A Bill of Divorcement

I have a hard time talking about Katharine Hepburn movies without relating this story, so bear with me: I saw The Aviator with my brother Matt, and neither of us were really taken with it, though perhaps for different reasons (IIRC, I thought Scorcese was ill-equipped to understand the engineer part of Howard Hughes; he found the stylization annoying). This was part of the conversation we had on the way out:

Matt: ... and just what the heck was Cate Blanchett doing?

Jay: Have you ever seen a Katharine Hepburn movie?

Matt: No.

Jay: They're like that. All of 'em.

That's a bit of an exaggeration, but Hepburn is unmistakably a distinctive personality on-screen, and it was interesting to see just how fully-formed that was in A Bill of Divorcement, her first movie. According to the introduction, that's just the way she was, brash and extraordinarily sure of herself, even when auditioning for her first film role; fortunately, George Cukor really liked that. It's an acting style and personality that makes for easy caricature or dismissal until you've seen just how much she can do with it, and although I'm not making flippant comments about her any more, I hope to get a better appreciation of Kate as ArtsEmerson's "Kate the Icon, Katharine the Iconoclast" series continues.

The series is looking like a good one; it started last weekend with this and Little Women and will run weekends through the rest of the year, showcasing her movies in roughly chronological order. A Bill of Divorcement was a special treat, as it was an archive print of a movie not readily available on video (at least in Region 1/A), which is kind of surprising: Not only is it Hepburn's first (and, as such, her first collaboration with George Cukor), but also features John Barrymore and Billie Burke (whose return to film after a decade-long absense in which the industry changed focus from silent shorts to talking features is an interesting story in and of itself). I'm not sure who owns this part of the Selznick library (Universal?), but it seems like prime material for at least a Warner Archive-style release.

Anyway, what's interesting to me is that it's one of the few times Hepburn has really seemed young to me; the image of her in my mind is the middle-aged spinster of The African Queen, and even in her 1930s romantic comedies, she seems to have needed a little time to accumulate her eccentricities. This is her as an ingenue, at least to start, and she proves to be pretty good at it.

As an aside, trying to figure out ages and times for this temporarily drove me a little batty - if it was taking place in 1932, Sydney (Hepuburn) was supposed to be about 20 years old, and she had never known her father because he was institutionalized right after returning from "the war" as shell-shocked... Well, World War I works, but it's kind of tight - say she's conceived/born in 1914, and he returns in 1917 or 1918, then she's about 18 and Hilary (Barrymore) spent about 14-15 years in hospital. Apparently, though, the play was first performed in 1921, so "the war" was probably the Boer War (1899-1902), making her about 20-ish but suggesting he was in the asylum for 18+ years, which seems a bit high.

Not that it really matters, but considering that at one point Margaret (Burke) mentions she was about Sydney's age when she married and it wasn't long after before Hilary went off to war, she can't be much older than 44 or so, and even though that's not much younger than the actress was herself, she certainly scans as older to me. Maybe that's a sign of the times - people live longer now and work to remain youthful longer - but it was a bit of a distraction, at least for a nitpicker like me.

Anyway, Sylvia Scarlett this weekend, although it looks like I'll miss it. Check out ArtsEmerson's "On Screen" schedule here to see when future films will be playing.

A Bill of Divorcement

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 October 2011 in the Paramount Theater Bright Screening Room (Kate the Icon, Katharine the Iconoclast)

Few performers get top billing in their first picture, and Katharine Hepburn is no exception; she's listed fourth in the credits for A Bill of Divorcement, below at least one co-star who has a much smaller role. She'd be a leading lady soon enough, though, and it's no surprise, as she more than holds her own with a veteran cast, which helps a movie that is in many ways dated remain quite dramatic and watchable today.

The film opens at a party on Christmas Eve, circa 1930, a week before Margaret Fairfield (Billie Burke) and Gray Meredith (Paul Cavanagh) are set to marry, now that Margaret's divorce is finally complete. That's about the same time that Kit Humphreys (David Manners) is set to leave England for Canada, bringing Margaret's daughter Sydney (Hepburn) with him if she accepts his marriage proposal. Except that things change on Christmas morning, as Sydney's father Hilary (John Barrymore) shows up, having left the sanitarium where he has been since before Syndney can remember. He's shaky, but lucid enough to strongly object to to Margaret's divorce and remarriage - and what comes out as a result shakes Sydney to the core.

This film was released in 1932, and a modern audience will have to make some allowances even beyond Sydney's father being named Hilary rather than vice versa. Mostly, that comes from the depiction of mental illness; not only has "post-traumatic stress disorder" not yet replaced "shell shock", but saying "there's madness in our blood!" is probably only considered a little melodramatic. Hilary's exile - with neither Margaret nor Sydney having visited for at least fifteen years - is treated far more cavalierly than Margaret's decision to divorce. One probably won't look at and think his or her great-grandparents were horrible people, but things were a bit different then.

Full review at EFC.

This That Week In Tickets: 4 January 2015 - 10 January 2015

See, this new calendar format is good, spreading the weekend crushes out visually.

Confession: Noticing that Big Eyes was playing in an even-numbered screen at the Somerville played some small factor in my seeing it at Assembly Row. A shame, because that turned out to be the only one of the big Christmas openings I was really interested in, as demonstrated by the blank space below that ticket.

Not that I really meant it to be blank; it was just that the two times I could easily make it to see Whiplash during the work week, but there were no evening showings those days. Not particularly drawn to Unbroken or Into the Woods, it was thus a pretty quiet week until Saturday, when I caught Selma at the Capitol. Funny MoviePass quirk - they apparently have a database of how much a movie is supposed to cost at each theater, which means that the Capitol raising their prices a buck to an even ten dollars makes the card freak out and not work, even though it happily works for $12.79 tickets elsewhere.

Such as Taken 3 the next evening. Idle MoviePass ethical question: Is it okay to ignore the 24-hour rule when they've refunded you the price of a ticket? See, just 22 hours between these two. The app can't enforce it, so you're kind of on the honor system. Anyway, even though it's not a lot of guilt, it does make one feel just a tiny bit worse about contributing to that movie's box office take.

Still, I gave it a good thrashing in the review and then was still ready for the midnight screening of The Satanic Rites of Dracula at the Coolidge. Fun, but maybe one's first Hammer Dracula (or at least, the first one stays awake through) should not be the last in the series.

Big Eyes

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2015 in AMC Assembly Row #10 (first-run, DCP)

There's a sort of sub-theme in Big Eyes about Margaret Keane (Amy Adams) improving her craft, getting away from her signature style, and coming into conflict with her husband as a result. It's an interesting thing to show up in a Tim Burton movie, isn't it?

I kid, somewhat, but at points that's the most interesting part of the movie. The story around it, about Margaret being the one to actually paint the works in question while her husband Walter (Christoph Waltz) took the credit and built a lucrative business around them, has much to recommend it, but tends to drift toward "what a weird series of events" even when it's clear that what's going on underneath is what inspired Burton and writers Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski.

When it's taking about art, and the difference between wanting to be an artist because that's how you imagine yourself and needing to get the images in ones head out - and evolving because you have new things to say and new ways to say it, the film is fairly interesting. It too often sidesteps the question of whether Margaret's art is actually "good", willing to portray her as a talent thwarted for being a woman, with any criticism of her work blunted for being aimed at the empty suit that is Walter, which is a missed opportunity to talk about how she doesn't need to be an invading genius to benefit from having some means of expression. It also seems like the film could have greatly benefited from more female perspective behind the camera, as well; the writers and director have done fine work in the past, but the film only addresses how being a woman - and a divorced one with a kid at that! - in this time and environment drives many of Margaret's decisions in a perfunctory manner.

Any Adams picks up a lot of slack there, though. She picks up on the desperation Margaret often feels which is generally unsaid, finds ways to balance it with the sarcasm and rebelliousness that comes with Margaret's growth as an artist, and generally show her becoming a more complete person. Waltz gives an often-entertaining performance as Walter, but it's a little too much so - it's all too evident to the audience what he is from the start, with little hint of what's going on with him. A bunch of other actors have similar issues, though with less screen time (Krysten Ritter, Jason Schwartzman, Terrence Stamp).

I enjoyed Big Eyes enough, and don't think I'm dinging it too much for not being the movie I wanted it to be. After all, those hopes didn't pop up until after if started watching the movie, as opposed to being a mindset I came in with.

The Satanic Rites of Dracula (aka Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 January 2015 in College Corner Theatre #1 (After Midnite, 35mm)

The Satanic Rites of Dracula is built around the idea that Dracula is, after seven prior movies in this series and hundreds of years of undeath, with the last hundred marked by repeated defeats, deaths, and resurrections, simply sick of it all and aims to bring the whole world down around him. It's as good a thing as any to hang a plot from in a series that, itself, is rather long in the tooth, although the funny thing is, this wouldn't be a bad place to start a series about a task force dealing with the intersection of black magic and dangerous science.

In fact, it's actually scarier than a lot of Hammer's action-horror hybrids because of the doomsday plague Dracula intends to unleash upon the world. Vampires are pretty old hat by this point in the series, with Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) mentioning yet another way to kill Dracula and barely giving a thought to his return. Things move along at an enjoyable enough pace, and there's a likable ensemble around Van Helsing (including Joanna Lumley as his granddaughter).

It's a fun vampire movie, with all the blood and sex you'd expect from it. It's just at the end of a cycle which was too played out to finish with a bang.

This Week In Tickets: 10 October 2011 to 16 October 2011

A busy moviegoing week:



Did I deliberately miss the bus last Thursday because it's much easier to make it downtown for screenings of Margaret and Love Crime (on their last day in town) when working from home in Cambridge than it is from the office in Burlington? No. But seeing as Thursday has been the usual day on which folks at my company are encouraged to telecommute, it's not a bad idea.

Margaret

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 October 2011 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run)

The easy comment to make about Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret is that it drags terribly at 149 minutes, so it's kind of amazing that the thing that kept it from release for over five years was the director's inability or unwillingness to budge from the three-hour cut to get it down to the two-and-a-half that the studio demanded. The last thing this movie needs, perhaps, is to be longer. Of course, one must then think of all the directors' cuts where some extra length has helped. After all, "boring" isn't just a matter of something taking a long time; it's taking a long time without seeming to accomplish anything.

So maybe this movie actually would play better with Lonergan's cut... but I kind of doubt it. Margaret doesn't feel like a group of interconnected stories that each needed to be given room to breathe; it feels like Lonergan started from one reasonably simple, interesting story (Anna Paquin as a teenage girl who struggles with the repercussions of a traumatic experience) and got distracted, following every subplot he could think of. These side-trips don't enhance or reinforce the central story, though, at least as the movie is constructed - it just dilutes it.

And that is really too bad, because Anna Paquin is kind of great in this. Her character can be pretty darn difficult to like at times, but it's a believable sort of teenage snottiness. Two and a half hours is a lot of time to spend with this character, though, and none of the others make for an especially interesting contrast, though they're all played well.

So, a disappointment. Hopefully Lonergan at least has this out of his system now, and can move on to hopefully make another movie as good as You Can Count on Me

Crime d'Amour (Love Crime)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 October 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run)

I think I read something about how the filmmakers opted to make Ludivine Sagnier sort of frumpy in this movie, as opposed to the usual sex-kitten image. This means messy hair, glasses, and a pimple on her forehead. Oh, and she's only ever naked from behind.

I kid. This is actually a deliciously fun little movie in which Sagnier plays Isabel, a loyal and admiring junior executive who routinely has her work appropriated by boss Kristin Scott Thomas. When each makes an attempt to move up in the company - and a man comes between them - Thomas's Christine opts to humiliate Isabelle. What she doesn't realize is that even though Isabelle seems meek, she has the potential to be just as ruthless as Christine, and is probably smarter.

There's a couple of things I really like about this movie. It's structured like the best kind of magic trick, with practically every bit of deception done in plain sight, with it up to the audience to figure out just where filmmaker Alain Corneau (with co-writer Nathalie Carter) is going with everything. We're given an unusual rooting interest, and the movie at times seems to stake out an interesting moral position - that it's not necessarily ruthlessness and ambition that are most evil, but arrogance. as SPOILER: the lynchpin to Isabelle's plan is that she's willing to act without ego, something that Christine just couldn't do. :RELIOPS

50/50

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 October 2011 in Somerville Theatre #5 (first-run)

There are many, many things about 50/50 that are kind of terrific, but something I always appreciate is when a movie or TV show finds good use for Matt Frewer. He and Philip Baker Hall have small parts as fellow cancer patients that share chemo times with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character. It's a little thing to notice, but it's the sign of of a movie that that sweats the details.

You'd expect those details to be sweated, as it's based on writer/producer Will Reiser's actual life, and funny, because his buddy when going through this was Seth Rogen, who co-stars as, well, basically Seth Rogen. Someday Rogen is going to win an Oscar for playing a sad or tragic variation on his jovial stoner persona, despite it being arguable that his ability to get the audience attached to these guys who make the audience laugh is the greater achievement. Here, he's really giving a great supporting performance, funny as usual but also displaying strength in just how he doesn't change as a friend.

Everyone's pretty good, especially Gordon-Levitt, who does a good job playing Adam as just a little tightly wound, which makes him at least a little funny even when the jokes come from how the people around him are reacting. Mostly, though, he's likable and able to let us see how afraid he is without it being overwhelming for the audience.

Fantasia 2022.13: "The Astronaut and His Parrot", Rani Rani Rani, Chorokbam, Shari, "Ronde de Nuit", Maigret, "Blackbear", Resurrection

Folks, Marc Lamothe was pretty excited to welcome Patrice Leconte (l) to Montreal for this screening of Maigret.

I could only extract a little bit from the Q&A, because it was pretty much entirely in French, and, ironically enough, I tapped out of French IV in high school when reading Maigret et le clochard and Le petit prince was looking to be my limit and it turned out I could benefit more from a study hall. There are days when I wonder if I'd be diagnosed with ADHD if I were a kid/teenager today, looking back on how well I always did on tests that said I was smart but often getting distracted and topping out at "doing pretty well" in class/work/life (which ain't a bad place to be; I'm not unhappy).

ANYWAY, like I said, I was mostly just getting bits of French and names and such, but it was enough to hear that this project started with Leconte wanting to work with Gerard Depardieu and this seeming like a fun project. I mean, I was kind of surprised Depardieu never played Maigret before now; it seems like such natural casting. He also said, in no uncertain terms, that a certain thread of the movie was not un homage to Rear Window, causing mock (?) gasps when he said something along the lines of it not being the sort of movie he'd where he'd build another film around a reference (maybe even that it wasn't a particular favorite). The French got to be too much for me to follow at that point.

Folks had fun with it; you can put it next to the Kenneth Branagh Poirots and enjoy them the same way - glossy period mysteries with beloved characters, not doing anything really new but delivering quite well. I kind of dig that it brought out a bit of an older crowd than a lot of the other Fantasia selections do. It's all genre movies, but some of the cozier genres don't get treated as being quite so cool even though they satisfy their audiences plenty.

Can't say I've got a whole lot to say about Mitch introducing the director and star of "Blackbear", the short that played before Resurrection, other than how director Bryce Hodgson, whom I sort of kind of recognized from iZombie (knew I'd seen him somewhere but needed someone mentioning the show to make me go "ooooh, yeah!"), seemed really grateful to have gotten this made and shown; it was apparently a big "getting something out there while the industry was in pandemic limbo" project for him. He also seemed really happy about it being a family project with not just young actress Sachi Adilman but other members of her family.

Mostly, I just want to point out that Mitch hit the Possession comparisons hard while introducing Resurrection, and, sure, I can see that. It's not quite as one-to-one as you can make it sound, I don't think, but it's kind of the vibe.

Next up: The end of Week 2 with Wednesday's Happer's Comet, Hansan: Rising Dragon, and Inu-Oh. Will it get written while it's kind of relevant to what's in theaters?

"The Astronaut and His Parrot"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, digital)

I say a lot of these films just aren't my thing when they are well-enough-made but either leave me cold or actively disliking them; "The Astronaut and His Parrot" is an example of the other side of this - a movie that is absolutely my thing, hitting things I particularly like and doing so not just very well, but it ways I probably like even more than others.

It starts off in standard enough fashion - an astronaut (Ali Fazal), spinning in space, the sole survivor after his craft has exploded on the way to the moon, the first leg on an expedition to Europa. He attempts to contact ground control, with no luck, flashes back to his last night with his young daughter, begging him not to go. Finally, though, there's something on the other end of the static…

And then cut to a parrot, next to a short-wave radio in an Indian fortune-teller's stall, squawking what the astronaut is saying back at him.

Imagine, ten minutes of oxygen left, knowing you're going to die, wishing you could report back to Mission Control or talk to your daughter one last time, and all you have is a random bird who could be anywhere on the planet. It's absurd. It's tragic. It's hilarious. But, for whatever reason, he doesn't give up, trying to get through to this parrot, figuring that maybe, somehow, it could repeat a message that might just get to the right ears. In the end, it's a pure act of hopefulness, the idea that even in the worst situation, if you try as hard as you can, things have a chance of working out.

I kind of love this. There's a version of this movie that tips all the way over into black comedy, but this one makes an effort not to, and, yeah, I kind of love that.

Rani Rani Rani

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Rani Rani Rani is a time-travel paradox movie, or would like to be, that probably isn't quite as clever as filmmaker Rajaram Rajendran would like it to be. It takes a fair amount of time to set up, and at times mostly seems to want little more than to inspire a second viewing where one tries to pick up whether there are Easter eggs or other hints of future iterations the viewer missed the first time around. That's a good place to start, but it could do a lot more while all that's going on.

After an ominous prelude, it introduces Rani (Tannishtha Chatterjee), middle-aged and married to an older man (Asif Basra), who has probably brought up how she was at the top of her class before her father made her drop out of school before. While he sulks in his truck, tired from walking to a nearby shrine and the heat in general, she decides to fill their water bottle and do her regular check-in at the abandoned factory where she's technically caretaker. Today, though, four young men are squatting there - Krishna (Abid Anwar), Chris (Danny Sura), Aran, and John (Alexx O'Neill). John may be the only one not ethnically South Asian, but only Krishna seems to speak any Hindi, with Chris and Aran planning a tech demonstration to get John to fund further development. Of what? Well, they ask Rani to sit and "pose for a picture", but their device transports her halfway back to where she came from. Plus, she soon realizes, fifteen minutes back in time, and when she realizes what happened while she was away, well, as mentioned, she's smart, and realizes that there's a way to fix it just up the road.

It's the sort of movie that sounds like a lot more fun than it is, because certain things could be built up a lot more. It's about Rani, but the guys with the time machine are potentially the makings of a sharply satirical movie: Not only are they mostly just opportunists who found the corpse of the poor dude from the opening who miscalculated his landing spot, but Chris and Aran talk a bit about cutting John and/or Krishna out, and even if one doesn't recognize how much of tech startup culture is having a good demo rather than a usable product, looking to get bought out before it falls apart, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to wonder how much that sort of amoral crew could screw each over with a time machine. The film spends a lot of time with them talking but not doing much.

Rani, meanwhile, is very passive until the very last iteration even when she is supposedly there to fix things, and her own challenges are laid out in relatively vague terms early on. Rajendran spends a lot of time showing just how impressively convoluted he can make a jigsaw puzzle timeline early on, but it's at the price of an interaction or two of Rani more or less stopping at "huh, look at me over there" and the guys speculating about alternate timelines, which is not a thing this movie needs to bring up. It's a little more wheel-spinning than needed to make the shift to actually having the time to fix stuff more satisfying - there's a point where it would be equally satisfying for the solution to just be making sure her husband has a full water bottle or not coming close to stopping there. Whichever way Rani decides to break out of the rut she's in.

Rani is an enjoyable heroine once she gets the hang of it, though. Much as there are pains taken to mention she's intelligent early on, she's not secretly an expert on any particularly useful topic. Tannishtha Chatterjee plays her as the sort of woman who can be sharp-tongued, especially with outsiders like the folks sitting at her factory, but got used to settling for the way things are done where her own life is concerned, and she builds that up over the course of the film, with Rajendran and the wardrobe department finding ways to emphasize this by having fewer headscarves and other garments making her seems small and tamed as the film goes on, discovering what she can do as she has the opportunity.

It would be nice if she got more opportunities to do something directly, or if some of the subplots around it were more fleshed out. Rani Rani Rani is a nifty little film, but one that can't help but show ways it could have been a better one.

Chorokbam

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

Chorokbam ("Green Night") is bleak, all the more so for how its dark omens are usually revealed as nothing out of the ordinary. Every looming nightmare that looks like it could tip the film into some more specific, intentional place, but, no; this is just a carefully - maybe exquisitely - rendered portrait of everyday despair.

It opens on Song-goun (Lee Tae-hoon), a worn-down man working as a security guard in the complex where he lives, finding a cat that has been hung by its neck in the playground. Sighing, he buries it, arriving home as wife Soon-na (Kim Min-kyung) is starting a day of drying chiles in the faint sliver of sunlight that reaches the ground between buildings. Elsewhere, their son Won-kyung (Kang Gil-woo) drives an accessibility van and lives out of hotels with a girlfriend who clearly wants more. They're not exactly disconnected, but will be brought closer together when Song-goun's father dies and they have to clean up the remnants of his life: A rented apartment with a former girlfriend who has nowhere else to go, Song-goun's sisters who are only there for the condolence gifts, and a few other things that make one wonder just what impression one makes upon the world.

They're a glum group, this family, but there's an interesting sort of dynamic to it; the cast does an impressive job of making their downcast weariness connected with their own pathologies and perspectives, but also in making each feel isolated, even when together. Kang Gil-woo has to play Won-kyung at an inflection point, starting to seriously wonder if things will ever get better but also less ground-down than his parents, pulling together how he seems to be giving up in scenes of his own individual life but still trying to keep the others positive. Kim Min-kyung is more active in her dissatisfaction as Soon-na, while Lee Tae-hoon's Song-goun is kind of imploded.

He is so obviously out of it that he can be frustratingly passive, and it is not, in fact, terribly satisfying when Soon-no expresses frustration that her husband is spending another scene just standing around and smoking right after you as a viewer may have mumbled under something under your breath about wishing this guy would do anything but stand around and smoke. Good on filmmaker Yoon Seo-jin for recognizing the moment when the audience may be starting to lose patience, but this isn't a film where that realization is going to lead to any sort of turnaround. It's not exactly a film about fixing things.

That's uncharitable, I suppose. Chorokmab is a movie that, if it's about anything, is about the everyday struggle with depression in an uncaring world, and in complaining about things not happening, when everything that does shows how acting out could be worse, a viewer might be rooting for destructive drama. But this movie, it drags, and it only occasionally makes up the difference in being interestingly presented. Shots are well composed, but not beautiful, although Yoon and Cinematographer Choo Kyeoung-yeob have eyes for when it's good to look at something straight-on and when to show the family as if spying on them. The music is appropriate, but doesn't draw one in or highlight something. The film is carefully made to communicate sadness and dissatisfaction but not really have much to say about their causes or solutions. Which, I guess, is depression - it can be there for no reason with no actual fix, and the film doesn't offer either.

It's well-done and well-acted. It will likely strike a chord with some, saying it's like that, and any day that ends with stepping back from the noose can feel like a victory. That's bleak, but I suspect that Yoon is communicating that feeling, alien to those who don't feel it regularly, better than most have.

Shari

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Documentaries from the Edge, DCP)

I don't recall whether I've seen any of the short films Nao Yoshigai has made prior to Shari, though their descriptions imply that they may either do what's done here - a whimsical look at a number of subjects in the same geographical area - or are completely different sorts of eccentric filmmaking. I'm mostly just curious - Shari is a delight on its own - but it will be interesting to see what else she comes up with, especially since features often get more visibility than shorts.

In this one, she visits the towns in and around Mount Shari on Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's main islands, in January 2020. Her narration mentions that she had been the previous summer, but seeing this place in the winter is something different. She shines her light on several locals - a woman who works as both a shepherd and baker having settled here after moving north every few years; an art collector who has quietly built an impressive collection of wooden carvings; a married pair of deer hunters; former fishermen lamenting how the lack of snow and sea ice that year is disrupting local patterns; and a few more. There's also a cryptid (Yoshigai in a suit) called "The Red Thing" in subtitles, snowball fights with the local kids, beautiful mountains, and deer meat.

It's tricky, I think, to do what's done here consistently, finding just the right residents to give a place color but also demonstrate something greater, especially something abstract: Yoshigaii's narration talks about the pull a place can have on people, whether it's folks returning home or others finding their way there, but in a down-to-earth way that doesn't sound spiritual in a particularly mystical way or elevate Shari over other places. She also takes the time to dig down a little further into more temporal topics, including things that affect the whole world such as climate change, by considering the concrete examples of this specific place. It's a pleasant visit with a quiet underlying level that says things may not stay this way for long.

It's also full of wonderful images, from the opening shot of a partially-obscured mountain that illustrates thoughts on the difference between clouds and wind, to the charming flights of fancy with the director's cryptid alter ego, to little kids find sumo wrestling (which is an entirely different thing with normal-proportioned people than the man-mountains who compete professionally!). The bits with The Red Thing and the children seem like they could be easily excised, but the kids inject a rambunctious energy into a form that can be staid or dour - there's schoolkids; this isn't a town or way of life that's dying - and The Red Thing, an obvious person in a suit from the start, lets the film be an outsider looking at something new, even if it's not immediately obvious that it's a Red Thing, as opposed to Yoshigai-as-herself, doing the narration (indeed, it's arguably both, with no line between them). It allows her a sort of clear but not detached outside perspective on this curious contrast of natural beauty with a sort of functional, not especially beautiful town that nevertheless seems to be in a sort of harmony.

I would greatly enjoy it if Yoshiagi decided to send The Red Thing to explore more small towns in sort of fringe locations, as this is a delight and there's no shortage of places like Shari with beautiful scenery and interesting people off the beaten path, but I suspect that's the sort of thing that could become less special quickly. I nevertheless look forward to seeing what else she comes up with; the combination of curiosity and finding a new way to tell a story like this is even more special.

"Ronde de nuit" ("The Night Watch")

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival:Axis, digital)

Is there a slot at any animation studio for Julien Regnard to direct something noirish? There's only so many opportunities, it seems, but "Ronde de Nuit" is such a fun little short with such style that it feels like somebody should strike while the iron is hot.

The trick, of course, is that this is noir-ish, more so than noir, often playing like a fever dream that convinces the audience of its reality than a mystery that slips into surrealism. A woman storms out of a party, her date not far behind, drunk. She drives, but there's still a crash, and when he comes to, she's gone. He walks back to the country house where the party continues, but is it more sinister? One gets the sense he recognizes that he's unwelcome.

It gets more mysterious and dark from there, a monochrome, stylish look that hits a sweet spot between Edward Gorey's opening titles for Mystery! and the Cartoon Saloon features where Regnard has spent much of his recent time as an animator. It's a nifty mix between fun and oppressive, which is just as it should be.

Maigret

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

I find myself moderately surprised that this film is the first time Gérard Depardieu has played Commissaire Jules Maigret. Both are arguably icons of Twentieth Century France well-known outside the country's borders, the casting seems obvious, and it's not as if Depardieu is above such middlebrow projects as detective novel adaptations. It is, thankfully, just about exactly what one would expect from Patrice Leconte directing this actor in this role: An enjoyable, unpretentious adaptation of a 200-page mystery novel.

It opens with a girl (Clara Antoons) nervously renting a dress and heading for a party. The next morning Maigret will be dispatched to where she was found dead, nearly impossible to identify. Lots of young women arrive in Paris during the post-war years, looking for fame or fortune before returning home to the provinces. Maigret meets another, Betty (Jade Labeste), and when his team identifies where the dead girl lived, he sets her up in the apartment, asking her to let him know if anyone else comes looking. This also leads them to Jeanine Arménieu (Mélanie Bernier), who may not have found fame as an actress, but appears to have found fortune in Laurent Clermont-Valois (Pierre Moure), the scion of a wealthy family. One wonders what the young man's mother (Aurore Clément) thinks of her, or of that friend who caused a stir when she showed up at the engagement party.

Watching Maigret is sort of like watching Mystery! on Thursday nights, back when it was a Thursday-night mainstay on PBS, much like Kenneth Branagh's Poirot films are. It's not quite as ornate, but it plays to a certain sort of visual nostalgia, a carefully reconstructed period where things are just so and things can be reasoned out even if there is murder and poverty and everyone is reeling from the war. The plot itself is straightforward to the point where there really aren't quite enough suspects for it to be a proper mystery, I suppose, but the feeling of getting into a cozy period mystery is very nice.

I suspect that those more familiar with the works of Georges Simenon may enjoy it a bit less; there are bits where Leconte seems to be having a bit of a wink at things like his pipe smoking or playing things a bit more modern and open than may have been done in the original novel (or maybe not; they're French, after all, willing to be a bit more direct about sex). It thankfully never seems to fall into the realm of self-parody, at least for someone like me. It plays straight, if a little more prone to banter than I'd expect.

And though this sort of mystery - one adapted from a single novel in a series that had 100 entries (Maigret et la jeune morte), combining short stories and novels - is often about the suspects and victims more than the detective, who is a steady lens through which to view the others in most cases. Still, I like Gerard Depardieu's Maigret. There's sadness and obsession to him that doesn't feel like it would lead to burnout, but instead gives him purpose. Leconte makes this a film about the detective as much as the case, and the actor shoulders that very well, but doesn't overwhelm it. There's an interesting empathy to him, especially when he plays off Jade Labeste, whose Betty is not looking for a father figure and has been hardened just enough that she recognizes him using her and is willing to use him right back, but they grow to understand each other.

All told, It's the sort of film where it is satisfying enough to watch a star match a role, and then see the character unravel a mystery, even if the solution itself is not quite so clever that it lingers in the mind in the days afterward. What does linger is how Maigret's drive comes from the waste of it all, with a capper highlighting just what potential the victim seemed to have, even if snuffed out by much less interesting people before it came to fruition.

"Blackbear"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, digital)

Bryce Hodgson has made an impressively dense short film in "Blackbear", about five minutes long and not necessarily with a whole lot more going on in it than the one line it gets to describe it in a festival program ("After finding her beloved uncle has unexpectedly passed, [Olive must come to terms with her grandmother's failing health."). But young Sachi Adilman is kind of terrific in one of those performances where one doesn't exactly see either acting or naturalism, but just a kid relaying what she's been given with all the conviction she can.

Indeed, that's what ultimately makes the short so great - it gets across how children that age sometimes need to communicate very badly but can't organize their thoughts or use just words. There's mixed media, jumbled timelines, things early on where it seems like Olive is either assuming you already know something that she hasn't said or where she doesn't realize that she skipped it until she circles back around. It's an impressive combination of a kid's not yet realizing that things can get worse and need to get help, told from the inside of a kid's buzzing, not-yet-organized head.

Resurrection

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

I suspect that Resurrection woks in large part because, when filmmaker Andrew Semans decides to make the jump from edgy and unnerving to something that is quite frankly deranged, he doesn't take a moment to pause and let the audience consider just where this film has led them. Nope, he keeps right on rolling, and the viewer doesn't have time to disengage, and now they're in this, quite possibly as panicked about having no way out of something crazy than the characters.

Mostly, that means Margaret (Rebecca Hall), a highly capable biotech executive. Daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman) is about to go to college; she's happy to mentor interns like Gwyn (Angela Wong Carbone) on both the business and knowing their own worth as women and individuals; the sex with married lover Peter (Michael Esper) is hotter still because they both know where they stand. And then, one day, she sees a man (Tim Roth) at a conference, and all that confidence collapses. He plays dumb during their first couple encounters, but soon stops denying that they have a history. After all, gaslighting Margaret won't put her under his thumb - although, truth be told, there seems to be a pretty good fact that he believes what he's saying, not that it makes him any less dangerous and reprehensible.

Even before Tim Roth's David shows up, Rebecca Hall is playing Margaret as someone who, for as decent a person as she may be, always talks like she keeps a hand on the knife in her purse. There's a nervous but aggressive energy throughout; by the time that Hall is given a chance to relay Margaret's origin story, the audience is already well-primed to see her as a fascinating mix of overwhelming trauma and defiance, and the twisting afterward is terrific: Semans gives Hall room to express the extent to which today's Margaret should be smarter and stronger than this, and they find nifty little ways to pivot her from fear to looking for a way out, letting her be both extremes with just a little nudge at any time.

It takes a bit for Roth to show up, but he instantly becomes a villain who is unique if maybe not fascinating - the details of his particular hold over Margaret swerve from conventional to unhinged in jaw-dropping fashion, but Roth holds back in some interesting ways. David is not, at this point, particularly charismatic; Margaret suggests that he was seductive at one point, but the way she relates it makes clear that this is in many ways an old playbook, and Semans pointedly doesn't give the man a chance to seduce the audience. Instead, Roth plays David as having piggish but bland entitlement, seldom raising his voice but dripping with contempt. The claims he uses to establish a hold on Margaret are outrageous, but his manner is that of a middle-class abuser, heightened, yes, but a conventional monster in most of the ways that matter.

Semans and his team do a neat job in building a tight little world that fits the film's story almost exactly but never feels too perfectly custom-made. The Albany, NY setting feels the right size, for instance, just big enough to have corporate headquarters and power but small enough to be overlooked; similarly, Margaret's office and apartment both signal that she's made something of herself, compared to the way the place David is staying makes him look small, but doesn't make it absurd that he might be able to have power over her. The film is focused on what it's looking to accomplish in each phase and moves between them in a manner that is smooth but also locks a new direction in place in a way that the audience can feel.

And the last leg is just delightfully mad; as much as one can sense that David has probably overplayed his hand with someone as capable and determined as Margaret, there's still tension as they move to a decisive confrontation, since there's size and an untapped reservoir of raw physical violence to him. It makes for a terrific climax, relieving a lot of pent-up tension while still taut and nerve-wracking in the moment. And when everything hits the finale of the finale…



As much as I'm glad to have seen this on the big screen, I kind of dread the talk that may have happened if it got a wide theatrical release and had modest success, because it's absolutely got the sort of ending that a certain type of viewer will read as a psychotic break and not what "really" happened. I, on the other hand, figure that David really did somehow implant Ben into his abdomen and keep him from further developing, and not just because I think lying to the audience in hope that the really clever ones will recognize it is a garbage move. Semans has made an effort to note that David was a brilliant scientist in the right field but also given the audience plenty of reason to infer a scandal that makes him an outcast, keeping biotech a regular presence in the background. It's also just more metaphorically satisfying if David is treating Ben as leverage, rather than just relying on guilt; he feels like a canny enough abuser to not give her reason to sever ties with him and never look back.



Even if one quibbles over the scale and form of insanity that the film ultimately features, though, Resurrection is a smart, nerve-wracking thriller that will hopefully sit on a long shelf of movies about Rebecca Hall being deliciously dangerous, especially when cornered.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 2 June 2023 - 8 June 2023

Well, apparently the place at South Bay is open again. Wonder what that was about!

(And now there's no showtimes listed for the Imax screen at Assembly Row. Weird!)

• The week's big opening is Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the first half of a two-part sequel to Into the Spider-Verse, with Spider-Man 2099 (voice of Oscar Isaac) leading all the spiders of the multiverse and clashing with Miles Morales and the friends he made in the first. It's at The Capitol, Jordan's Furniture (Imax), Fresh Pond, West Newton, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Imax Xenon & Dolby Cinema plus showings in Tamil/Spanish/Mandarin), Kendall Square, South Bay (including Imax Xenon & Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill. Surprisingly, there was no 3D version of this made, even though that was a part of what made the first so eye-popping.
  
  Also opening is The Boogeyman, a Steven King adaptation that more or less offers what you'd guess from the title. It's at Fresh Pond, CinemaSalem, Boston Common, Kendall Square, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards.
  
  Boston Common has matinees of League of Super-Pets Saturday and Wednesday. K-Pop concert "Suga - August D Tour 'D-Day' in Japan" will stream live(?) at South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards on Saturday night. Raiders of the Lost Ark gets a couple shows at South Bay Sunday ahead of the upcoming Dial of Destiny. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has an "Early Access" show at Boston Common (Imax Xenon), South Bay (Dolby Cinema), and Assembly Row on Wednesday before the usual Thursday night previews.
• Sanctuary opens at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Somerville, Kendall Square, and Boston Common this week; it looks to ride a line between dark comedy and thriller as a dominatrix (Margaret Qualley) attempts to get a cut of the money her client (Christopher Abbot) will make after a promotion, claiming he can't hack his new job without her services, even as he tries to sever their relationship.
  
  Midnights at the Coolidge this weekend are two action classics on 35mm: The Raid on Friday night and Leon: The Professional on Saturday (and it's apparently The Room week on Friday as well). On Sunday, they have "A Very Wes Anderson Afternoon", a mini-marathon of Rushmore, The Darjeeling Limited, and The Grand Budapest Hotel. Monday offers both a Big Screen Classic showing of My Cousin Vinny with Odie Henderson leading a pre-show seminar and a Panorama show of documentary Americonned with director Sean Claffey and several subjects on hand afterward. The Godfather: Part II plays Tuesday and Crooklyn on Wednesday, both with special guests, while Thursday's Cinema Jukebox show is a 35mm print of The Bodyguard.
• The Brattle Theatre has Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game from Friday to Tuesday, presented in a new 4K restoration of the 1959 reconstruction of the original cut. They'll also be showing a 35mm print of Enys Men over that stretch, the creepy shot-on-film isolation-horror movie should look even better in that format after playing at BUFF.
  
  They will also be unloading some of the various posters, books, Blu-rays, T-shirts, and other stuff that a movie theater accumulates on Saturday afternoon in a special jumble sale. On Wednesday, they have a special presentation of documentary The Automat (with director Lisa Hurwitz in person) and the automat-set Easy Living on 35mm afterward. On Thursday, they pay tribute to Prince with a double feature of Purple Rain & Sign O' the Times, the latter on 35mm.
• Big week for Indian film at Apple Fresh Pond: Friday sees openings for Hindi divorce comedy Zara Hatke Zara Bachke, Telugu action-drama Nenu Student Sir! (through Monday), Telugu comedy Pareshan (through Monday), Tamil thriller Kather Basha Endra Muthuramalingam (through Monday), Tamil superhero movie Veeran, and Punjabi sports story Medal. They also have 2018: Everyone is a Hero again, although this time in a Telugu dub.
  
  Vietnamese director Ly Hai's latest action-comedy Lat Mat 6: Tam Ve Dinh Menh (aka "Face Off 6: The Ticket of Destiny") plays at South Bay. I don't believe "Lat Mat" is anything but a brand name, with this movie about a group of friends trying to retrieve a winning lottery ticket after the one holding it died suddenly not actually having anything to do with the others in the series.
  
  Anime Suzume continues at the Coolidge and Boston Common, subtitled. Shin Kamen Rider has an encore show at Assembly Row on Monday evening.
• It's 70mm and Widescreen Fest time at The Somerville Theatre, kicking off (as is becoming traditional) with their 70mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey on Friday & Saturday, with Geronimo: An American Legend on 70mm Sunday evening. Other special programming includes Saturday's midnight show of Escape from New York (on 35mm), a new 4K restoration of Italian comedy Una Vita Difficile (which apparently never had an official US release) on Monday and Tuesday, and a 35mm "F— the Nazis" show of The Blues Brothers on Wednesday.
• Landmark Theatres Kendall Square mostly goes with the mainstream openings this week, but kicks off a Harrison Ford Retro Replay series on Tuesday with Air Force One.
• The Lexington Venue is open through Sunday with Super Mario Bros., You Hurt My Feelings and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
  
  The West Newton Cinema adds Spider-Verse to The Little Mermaid, You Hurt My Feelings, Guardians, Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, Air, and Super Mario Brothers (Saturday/Sunday afternoons). Closed Monday.
  
  The Luna Theater has King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard concert documentary Chunky Shrapnel on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings; How to Blow Up a Pipeline Saturday afternoon; Little Richard: I Am Everything Saturday evening; Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Sunday; plus a Weirdo Wednesday show.
  
  Cinema Salem opens Spider-Verse and The Boogeyman, holding over The Little Mermaid and You Hurt My Feelings.
• Joe's Free Films has its first outdoor movie listing of the summer season, with Encanto playing at Tufts on Friday night as part of Reunion Weekend.

Looking to catch Spider-Man on a fancy screen, plus Sanctuary, maybe some of the giant-film goodness at the Somerville, and I really should see The Rules of the Game and some of the other one-offs…

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 28 April 2023 - 4 May 2023

It's festival week, so pick your poison. Which may happen to be "what can maybe do something for a week or two before the big Marvel movie wipes things out".

• Independent Film Festival 2023 keeps going on, having all three screens at the Somerville plus the Brattle through Tuesday, and then closing at the Coolidge with Past Lives on Wednesday. Some of the scheduling is a bit unusual - slots where there's just one movie, early starts on Monday and Tuesday - so check the schedule carefully and remember that the T is probably still making the Red Line slower than usual if a day includes getting from Davis to Harvard or back.
• Perhaps the biggest opening of the week is Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret., an adaptation of Judy Blume's young-adult novel - maybe the first YA novel to really attain "classic" status? - from director Kelly Fremon Craig, with Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret and Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, and Benny Safdie in the grown-up roles. It's at Coolidge Corner, the Capitol, Fresh Pond, West Newton, Boston Common, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Also opening is Big George Foreman, a religious-skewing biography with Khris Davis as the legendary boxer, Forest Whitaker as his trainer, and George Tillman Jr. directing. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, South Bay, Arsenal Yards, and Assembly Row.
  
  Sisu gets a pretty big opening for a Finnish film, but it's an over-the-top action flick about a veteran who strikes gold during the Lapland War and has to fight his way through a ton of Nazis to get it to town. It's at Boston Common (Dolby Cinema), Kendall Square, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), and Assembly Row (Dolby Cinema).
  
  Return of the Jedi returns to theaters for a 40th anniversary run leading into May the Fourth, playing at Boston Common, South Bay, Assembly Row. Flashdance also celebrates its 40th, playing South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards on Sunday. Documentary Nuclear Now, an advocacy thing directed by Oliver Stone, plays Boston Common on Monday; mental-health/disability doc plays Boston Common Wednesday & Thursday. Boston Common and South Bay have an Imax Guardians of the Galaxy Marathon, featuring all three films but probably not the Christmas special from the runtime, on Wednesday.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre and Boston Common pick up Polite Society, in which a Desi London teen who dreams of being a stuntwoman decides to rescue her older sister from the family she's marrying into by proving they are up to no good.
  
  Midnights at the Coolidge this weekend, come from Stan Winston, with a 35mm print of Pumpkinhead with an intro-via-Zoom from Winston's son Matt on Friday and A Gnome Named Gnorm on Saturday. They start May's Jim Jarmusch rep series on Tuesday with a 35mm print of Stranger Than Paradise, while Thursday's Big Screen Classic is a new restoration of A Place in the Sun.
• The weekend's big opening from India is Ponniyin Selvan: Part Two (aka PS-2), the second part of a historical epic whose first entry came out about six months ago. Apple Fresh Pond has both Tamil and Telugu showtimes, while Boston Common's Tamil showtimes include Imax screenings. Fresh Pond also opens Agent, a Telugu-language spy thriller, and Pacachuvum Albhuthavilakkum, a Malayalam road-trip comedy. Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan and Virupaksha also continue at Fresh Pond.
  
  Born to Fly his Boston Common the same day it opens in China; it features Wang Yibo and Zhou Dongyu and was originally meant to come out six months ago as a response to Top Gun: Maverick, but got pulled back to have its effects work upgraded once folks actually saw Maverick.
  
  Anime Suzume continues at the Coolidge, Boston Common, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards. It's subtitled-only, by and large, so check before reserving tickets. The Ghibli-fest selection this week is Spirited Away, playing Boston Common Tuesday (subtitled).
• Landmark Theatres Kendall Square has the new(ish) film from François Ozon, Everything Went Fine, featuring Sophie Marceau as a woman whose father has recently had a stroke and asks her to help and his life. Ozon has had two more films released in France since this one, but apparently French art-house films still take their time crossing the Atlantic.
  
  The Tuesday Retro Replay is Taxi Driver, the first of a Scorsese/De Niro series for May.
• Jordan's Furniture has Avatar: The Way of Water back on the giant Imax screens in Reading & Natick for the weekend, and will be open Thursday for Guardians 3.
• The Somerville Theatre is all IFFBoston, all the time through Tuesday, but hosts the Fly Fishing Film Tour on Thursday. One of the films features local fly-fishers, who will be there along with a local guide service for a meet-and-greet.
  
  The Capitol teams with "Monstahxpo" and The Spooky Picture Show for an anniversary screening of Night of the Demons on Friday night, with star/horror icon Linnea Quigley on hand.
• The Brattle Theatre is hosting IFFBoston until Tuesday, but has Rogue One on Wednesday and Thursday for "May the Fourth".
• The Harvard Film Archive is taking a break this weekend, but has two programs of student films at 7pm Friday and noon Saturday.
• Belmont World Film streams Chile '76 through Sunday, with an in-person screening at Arsenal Yards on Monday (including guest speaker Juan Mandelbaum). French/Spanish thriller The Beasts begins streaming on Tuesday, ahead of its in-person show next week.
• Joe's Free Films shows an early outdoor screening with Ten Things I Hate About You on the lawn at Tufts Friday night; the school is also showing student films Monday to Thursday.
• Wicked Queer continues to stream some encores through Sunday night.
• The Lexington Venue is open through Sunday with Air and Chevalier.
  
  The West Newton Cinema opens Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret and Beau Is Afraid, otherwise slimming down to Chevalier, Air, Super Mario Brothers, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. Closed Monday.
  
  The Luna Theater appears quiet, with John Carpenter's original Halloween on Sunday (halfway there!) and a free UMass Lowell "Philosophy and Film" presentation of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Thursday the only things on the website.
  
  Cinema Salem is primarily hosting the Salem Horror Fest from Friday to Sunday, but also has How to Blow Up a Pipeline and Super Mario Bros. through Monday. They're "May the Fourth" presentation is Mel Brooks's Spaceballs on Thursday.

The festival is eating all my time through Wednesday, and then I probably won't have a chance to catch a matinee before heading on on vacation on Thursday.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 12 April 2024 - 18 April 2024

Kind of wish I had a work holiday on Monday to fit an extra movie or two in, to be honest.

• The week's big new release is Civil War, the new one from Alex Garland starring Kirsten Dunst as an American photojournalist who has covered war zones all over the world now covering the disintegration of her own country. It appears to be more about war than the actual things dividing America at the moment, but neither Garland nor Dunst often misses. It's at the Coolidge, the Somerville, Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture (Imax), West Newton, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Imax Xenon & Dolby Cinema), Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay (including Imax Xenon & Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Imax Laser & Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
  
  The Long Game, with Jay Hernandez as the mentor to a bunch of Mexican-American caddies who create their own golf course, opens at Fresh Pond and Boston Common,
  
  A different "impossibly-fast-growing spider" movie than the one which played BUFF - Sting rather than Infested - plays Boston Common, South Bay, and Assembly Row. Arcadian, which stars Nicolas Cage in a Quiet Place-looking thing as a recluse sheltering from monsters who come out at night, plays Causeway Street and South Bay.
  
  A new version of Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead, starring Simone Joy Jones and Nicole Richie, opens at South Bay.
  
  Shrek 2 gets an anniversary re-release at Boston Common, South Bay, and Assembly Row.
  
  There's an early-access show of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare at Boston Common, the Seaport, Assembly Row, and Chestnut Hill on Saturday; a surprise AMC "Screen Unseen" preview plays Boston Common, Causeway Street, Assembly Row on Monday. Various theaters will be doing "Spider-Monday" for the next couple of months, with Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man kicking it off at the Coolidge (35mm), Boston Common (also Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday), the Seaport (also Tuesday/Wednesday), and Assembly Row (also Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday). Holocaust drama Irena's Vow plays Boston Common Monday and South Bay on Monday and Tuesday.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre is starting to look a little more like expected as they expanded, opening three new movies along with Civil War: La Chimera comes from Italy, with Josh O'Connor as a man with a near-supernatural talent for finding hidden artifacts, drawn to a mysterious new dig; it's also at Kendall Square, the Lexington Venue, Boston Common, and the Seaport. The Beast, from France, features Léa Seydoux as a woman in 2044 who has been drawn to the same man in multiple lives, via reincarnation, virtual reality, or perhaps erased memories. That also plays Kendall Square and Boston Common.
  
  Screen 6 looks like it's being used in large part for specialty bookings that hang around one week, with this week's selection being Remembering Gene Wilder, which is, well, that. Director Ron Frank will be on-hand for a special show on Sunday afternoon.
  
  The midnight zombies this weekend are a new digital restoration of Cemetery Man on Friday and a 35mm print of [REC] on Saturday; for the polar opposite, there's a Kids' Show of Mary Poppins on Sunday morning. If Civil War is not enough Kirsten Dunst, Monday offers to 35mm presentations, with a Big Screen Classic show of Marie Antoinette at 7pm and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man at 9:45pm. What's the Score presentations include Shaft on 35mm film Tuesday and Joker on film Wednesday. Thursday's Big Screen Classic is a 35mm print of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights.
• Landmark Kendall Square opens Housekeeping for Beginners, about a woman who never aspired to motherhood finding herself forging bonds with her girlfriend's daughters.
  
  There's a "listening event" for Pearl Jam: Dark Matter on Tuesday, with the new album playing twice, once in the dark and once with visuals (also at Boston Common). The Tuesday New Hollywood show is William Friedkin's Sorceror.

The Capitol in Arlington gets Blackout, the new werewolf story from Larry Fessenden with Alex Hurt as a painter in a small town who worries the holes in his memory correspond to a number of vicious killings. They also have GoodFellas for Capitol Crimes on Friday & Monday, plus Fried Green Tomatoes for "Good For Her" on Saturday & Tuesday. They also have matinees for school vacation, with The Lego Movie from Monday to Wednesday and The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part Wednesday to Friday.

In addition to Civil War and The First Omen on 35mmThe Somerville Theatre wraps their "Smooth Cinema" series on Friday with Arthur on 35mm, as well as a "Super-Smooth High Seas Party" in the Crystal Ballroom afterward, with tickets for the party including the movie. They have a 4K double feature of restored The Third Man & Coup de Torchon on Saturday & Sunday; a 35mm noir double feature of The Postman Always Rings Twice & The Bribe on Monday, a special presentation of Growing Pains featuring a Q&A with the cast and crew on Tuesday, a tale-of-two-studios pairing of The Wizard of Oz & It Happened One Night (the former on 35mm) Wednesday, and a special presentation of Indigo Girls: It's Only Life After All on Thursday.

• More South Asian movies for Eid this weekend at Apple Fresh Pond (and elsewhere). Friday brings Telugu-language horror-comedy Geethanjali Malli Vachindi; Tamil-language drama DeAr, in which a wife's snoring is a sort of proxy for the challenges newlywed couples face; Romeo, a Tamil-language romance about a husband hoping to win the love of his wife in an arranged marriage; Aavesham, a Malayalam-language action flick with a gangster offering engineering students the chance for revenge against the upperclassmen who hazed them; Varshangalkku Shesham, a Malayalam-language comedy about two friends viewed at different points in their lives; and from Pakistan, Daghabaaz Dil, an Urdu-language romantic comedy about a couple who may ironically find love while attempting to sabotage their upcoming arranged marriage. Marathi comedy Alibaba Aani Chalishitale Chor, in which the attendees of a dinner party hear a kiss and then a slap during a brief power outage, plays Saturday and Sunday.
  
  Held over at Fresh Pond are Hindi-language movies Crew, Maidaan (also at Boston Common), and Bade Miyan Chote Miyan (also at Boston Common). Telugu-language Family Star also stays at Boston Common.
  
  Korean concert film Suga - Agust D Tour 'D-Day': The Movie plays Boston Common, Causeway Street, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards. Also from South Korea, thriller Exhuma continues at Boston Common and Causeway Street. Vietnamese drama Mai continues at South Bay.
  
  Chinese romance Viva La Vida continues at Causeway Street; YOLO continues at Boston Common and returns to Causeway Street.
  
  Japanese films hanging around are Perfect Days at the Coolidge, and Kendall Square; The Boy and the Heron is still at West Newton.
• The Alamo Seaport has Dawn of the Dead through Wednesday for its 45th anniversary. Their rep calendar has Clerks for the Time Capsule show on Friday, Tuesday, and Wednesday; Labyrinth on Saturday and Sunday, the latter a "movie Party"; and Blue Giant for "World of Animation" on Monday and Tuesday.
• The Embassy continues Wicked Little Letters and Farewell Mr. Haffmann, with The Taste of Things playing Saturday.
• The New England Aquarium adds "Ocean Paradise" to its rotation of Imax 3D films starting this weekend.
• Wicked Queer 40 continues through Sunday at The Brattle Theatre, the Bright Screening Room at the Paramount, and The Museum of Fine Arts, plus free best-in-show presentation at BU's GSU Auditorium on Wednesday, On Monday, they shift to streaming, with many programs available to stream in Massachusetts through the 22nd or 30th.
• After Wicked Queer, The Brattle Theatre has the annual Muppet Madness Marathon on Monday, this year featuring The Dark Crystal, Muppet Treasure Island, and The Muppet Movie, the last on 35mm. Monday is also the start of Massachusetts Space Week, with the Brattle hosting a Space Film Festival, featuring 2001: A Space Odyssey on 35mm Monday, Sunshine on 35mm Tuesday, and Gravity on Wednesday. There's also an RPM Fest Presentation of "Vitreous Chamber: Films by Malic Amalya & Nathan Hill" on Wednesday and a Grrl Haus Cinema show on Thursday.
• The Harvard Film Archive has two programs of the short films of Margaret Tait this weekend, with Ute Aurand hosting "Films by and about Margaret Tait" on Friday while Luke Fowler presents Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait on 35mm, plus three of her shorts, on Saturday. Sunday has the last film of their Martin Rejtman series, Silvia Pietro, on 35mm, as well as Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Midimbe's Order of Things - Part I. The Edward Yang series continues on Monday with That Day, on the Beach, including a video introduction by actor David Mao.
• Joe's Free Films shows a free screening of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on 35mm on Friday in room 26-100, with The MIT Lecture Series Committee also showing a presentation of Sudanese film Goodbye Julia in that room on Monday.
• ArtsEmerson has two documentaries in the Bright Screening Room of the Paramount this Saturday, with Boston Asian-American Film Festival presenting Big Trouble in Little Chinatown, which chronicles the fight for Chinese districts to survive amid gentrification and the spike in anti-Asian racism around the Covid epidemic, while Unseen (preceded by short "Doc West Moves") follows a blind, undocumented immigrant attempting to become a social worker.
• The Bright LIghts at the Paramount has two events this week: Fairlyland plays on Wednesday with the original book's author Alysia Abbott on-hand to discuss the adaptation of her memoir of San Francisco in the 1970s & 1980s; American Fiction plays on Thursday with Emerson professor Jerald Walker leading discussion.
• Boston Turkish Film & Music Festival has streaming selections through Monday.
• Belmont World Film moves to the Embassy in Waltham on Monday for Hesitation Wound, a Turkish film about a lawyer who must split her time between her criminal practice and her hospitalized mother. They also have the previous week's selection, Traces, available to stream from Tuesday to the following Sunday.
• The final weekend of Dune: Part Two at The Museum of Science appears to be sold out, but they will be adding "Superhuman Body: World of Medical Miracles" to the Omnimax rotation starting Saturday.
• The Lexington Venue has La Chimera and Wicked LIttle Letters (Friday/Saturday/Sunday/Wednesday/Thursday) from Friday to Sunday, and also has another weekend of indie matinees: documentary Patrick and the Whale (playing with the 30-minute local short film program "Voices of Our Youth") on Saturday and indie drama Two Lives in Pittsburgh (playing with animated short "Pete") on Sunday.
  
  The West Newton Cinema adds Civil War and continues Wicked Little Letters, One Life, Kung Fu Panda 4, Dune: Part Two, American Fiction, and The Boy and the Heron.
  
  The Luna Theater has Late Night with the Devil on Friday, The Craft on Saturday, American Psycho on Sunday, a Weirdo Wednesday show, and a free UMass Lowell Department of World Languages & Cultures presentation of Big Fight in Little Chinatown on Thursday.
  
  Cinema Salem has Late Night With the Devil, Civil War, Monkey Man, and, yes, Hundreds of Beavers from Friday to Monday. There's a Night Light show of Switchblade Sisters on Friday, a surprise "Whodunnit… With a Fake Boston Accent" show on Sunday afternoon (free, but registration at Race to Solve the Case encouraged), and the first night of the Seagrass 420 Film Festival, featuring Up in Smoke and The Cabin in the Woods, on Thursday.
  
  If you can make it out to Woburn, Sweet Dreams is playing at the Showcase there and stars Johnny Knoxville as the reluctant softball coach at a sober-living facility, with Kate Upton and Jay Mohr also in the cast. The Showcase in Dedham has an English dub of Capitán Avispa, a Dominican animated film about heroic honeybees.

Yeah, I'll do Civil War, Arcadium, The Beast, and maybe La Chimera. I'll probably choose the noir over the Kirsten Dunst double on Monday, and also hit Sunshine.

Fantasia 2020.04: Baby: The Secret Diary of a Mom to Be

Like I mentioned yesterday, sometimes it's hard to get screeners on the weekend, and that's before I took a large chunk of the day writing up shorts and then deciding that I was going to do my usual Sunday crosswords for a couple hours or so. A bummer, because the one movie I watched turned out to be a bit of a minor disappointment. Secret Diary of a Mom to Be isn't bad, but it's not as good as Jody Luk's first film and just generally feels like it should be better if she wasn't playing straight down the middle so often but instead went for the bigger laugh or odder circumstance more often.

Ah, well. No baseball tonight so plenty of time for the stuff already being lined up.

Baby: The Secret Diary of a Mom to Be

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)

It's probably not a great sign that the bits that caught my attention in The Secret Diary of a Mom to Be weren't really anything to do with the story but random things I didn't know about life in Hong Kong, like how professional athletes don't make a lot of money and how one of the things they ask at your job interview is your preferred method for entering Chinese characters into a computer. It's a sign of how observant she is and how she's able to spin a movie out of little things, but it would be nice if the material at the center was as interesting as the stuff at the edges.

That center contains Carmen Yau (Dada Chan Ching), a PR manager at a Hong Kong sports stadium, and her husband Oscar Ching (Kevin Chu Kam-Yin), star of the basketball team that plays there. Carmen is up for a promotion to manage the company's facility in Vietnam, and doesn't figure anything will stand in the way - though all of her best friends are either pregnant or recent mothers, she's got a highly irregular period that makes conception very unlikely. But not, it turns out, impossible, and while her friends and co-workers are thrilled for her, she's not close to sure, especially once mother-in-law Margaret (Candice Yu On-On) finds out, bringing her friend Tam Yuk-Wing (Louis Cheung Kai-Chung), a popular childbirth consultant, in to help manage her pregnancy.

Margaret and Tam aren't the only people who feel free to make decisions for Carmen once they find out she's pregnant, and it's the seed for a potentially interesting story, as is Oscar feeling that he's got to become the family breadwinner now but not really equipped for it. Writer/director Jody Luk Yi-Sam doesn't exactly have much of a story lined up here, though - Carmen's job recedes into the background, Oscar picks up a new group of expecting/recent father friends ("Baba Club") to match Carmen's besties, and the movie becomes something of a split hangout picture with occasional bits of the couple together grousing about how the other doesn't understand. Eventually there's an well-worn suspected-infidelity plot to bring things to a climax that even the characters don't seem to believe in.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 4 November 2011 - 10 November 2011

No "This Week in Tickets" this week, not for lack of material, but actually for so much seen that I had no time to write. This week looks a little quieter, so I should have time for a double-sized TWIT next week.

• The movie getting on a lot of screens this weekend is Tower Heist, with Ben Stiller as an apartment concierge scheming to rob the occupant of the penthouse suite, as that guy's Ponzi scheme destroyed the staff's retirement savings. Not knowing the first thing about doing this, they recruit Eddie Murphy's professional crook to help. I'm a bit higher on this than some others; I don't hate director Brett Ratner the way a lot of writers seem to (granted, I find him mediocre-but-capable as opposed to actively bad). Also opening is A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, so I guess Kal Penn isn't working at the White House any more. Aside from the returning Penn, John Cho, and Neil Patrick Harris, I see that Richard Riehle is reprising his role from The Hebrew Hammer (I'd say more, but, honestly, I haven't seen the other Harold & Kumar movies, and it's a little early for Christmas stuff, honestly).



• Surprisingly not opening at the multiplexes is Like Crazy; you've got to head to Kendall Square (where it's got two screens) for that. I may not have loved it, but I kind of liked it, and the long-distance romance story with Felicity Jones and Anoton Yelchin seems pretty mainstream-friendly. Maybe Paramount's giving it a slow roll-out. Also playing at Kendall Square is Oranges and Sunshine, a based-on-a-true-story story of British kids sent to Australia by the government and told their parents were dead; Emily Watson plays the social worker who stumbles onto it and tries to reunite the adult children with their parents; Hugo Weaving (in what seems like a rare non-villain role) and David Wenham also star. Also kind of rare is the scheduled one-week booking, in that Revenge of the Electric Car is a documentary sequel, following up Who Killed the Electric Car? with the story of how consumer demand has led to a resurgence of development in the Electric Vehicle field. The first was an entertaining bit of advocacy, so here's hoping the same can be said for the second.



• The Brattle has a somewhat cobbled-together schedule this week, although many of the parts are interesting. On Friday and Saturday, the screen is split between Margaret (matinees and 7pm) and The Catechism Cataclysm, a pair of interesting if imperfect films. I'm not sure whether Margaret needed to lose about forty-five minutes or have the extra half-hour in Kenneth Lonergan's director's cut put back in, and I'm not sure whether The Catechism Cataclysm could do with being weirder all the way through or whether it should have saved all its strangeness for the end, but they're both worth watching at least once.
  
  The next couple of days (Sunday the 6th and Monday the 7th) are sort of an Alexander Payne series, with a double feature of Sideways and Election playing on Sunday and a CineCaché preview screening of his new movie The Descendants (with George Clooney as a father forced to take unaccustomed responsibility for home and family in Hawaii) on Monday. That one's free but will sell out; admission is only guaranteed with a series subscription or for the first 100 people to buy tickets for Sunday's double feature.
  
  Sunday also features Israeli gay activist Assi Azar in person to introduce his featurette on coming out, "Mom & Dad: I Have Something to Tell You". The Harvard Book Store will be hosting author talks at 6pm on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday; I suspect Wednesday's Guest Jonathan Lethem had a hand in choosing the screening of John Carpenter's They Live that follows his talk at 8pm (if not, then it's amazingly random!).
  
  And on Thursday evening, the Brattle hosts Opening Night of the Boston Asian-American Film Festival. The picture is Almost Perfect, which features Kelly Hu as the stable center of a California family who helps everybody else but doesn't have time to help herself. Director Bertha Pan Bay-Sa and co-star Tina Chen will be on-hand to introduce the film and take questions afterward.



• Another festival, The Boston Jewish Film Festival, will be spending time at the Coolidge Corner Theatre throughout the week; there's at least one showing every day, although it's sometimes matinees and sometimes evenings. The means there will be a fair amount of bouncing between screens and formats for Martha Marcy May Marlene (always on film), Margin Call (some film, some video), and Take Shelter (all video); check The Coolidge's website before heading out.
  
  Aside from the BJFF, there are a few nifty specials: True Romance plays midnight on both the 4th and 5th; it's joined on Friday night by a Dumb & Dumber quote-along and on Saturday night by the monthly screening of The Room. If you prefer getting up early to staying up late, Saturday morning offers a Kids' Show screening of The Great Muppet Caper and Sunday morning a Talk Cinema screening of Lars Trier's apocalyptic drama Melancholia.



• The Museum of Fine Arts film program also has several BJFF screenings, but this weekend also features a couple of other new presentations: On Friday night, there are two chances to see Urbanized with director Gary Hustwit in person for both; it's his third film about design (following Helvetica and Objectified; this one focuses on making cities both beautiful and liveable. There are also three chances to see His Mother's Eyes, a new film from French director Thierry Kilfa starring Catharine Deneuve as a successful woman at the center of a family that has torn itself apart; it plays Saturday the 5th at 4:30pm, Sunday the 6th at 10:45am, and Wednesday the 9th at 8pm. It's the start of a Film of Cateherine Deneuve series, which continues on Thursday afternoon with Time Regained.



• Speaking of directors in person, ArtsEmerson has a couple coming to the Bright Screening Room: Hassan Ildari introduces his 1989 thriller Face of the Enemy, set during the aftermath of the 1979-1981 Iran hostage crisis, at 6pm on Friday, and director Naomi Uman is there for her "Ukranian Time Machine" collection of films made during her return to her ancestral village on Saturday at 8:15pm.
  
  There will also be classic films on offer: Saturday afternoon, they'll be running an IB Technicolor print of the 1939 animated Gulliver's Travels, made directed by the legendary Fleischer brothers and preceded by two of their cartoon shorts. They also start the second leg of their "Kate the Iconoclast/Katharine the Icon" series with Woman of the Year on Saturday the 5th (5:45pm) and Sunday the 6th (2pm). November highlights her films with Spencer Tracy with a theme of Kate's character attempting to be a supportive wife, even if that's not always her nature; here they're married newspaper columnists.



• The Harvard Film Archive sometimes goes for the obscure, but this weekend they begin a program dedicated to a widely known master: Once Upon a Time... Sergio Leone. This weekend kicks off with two of his "Man with No Name" westerns, A Fistfull of Dollars (Friday at 7pm) and For a Few Dollars More (Friday at 9pm and Sunday at 4:30pm), along with the full 229-minute European cut of his final film, Once Upon a Time in America (Saturday at 7pm). Sunday and Monday nights, the venue will host the local premiere of Nicholas Ray's just completed/restored We Can't Go Home Again.



• RA. One, Velayudham, and 7am Arivu continue at Fresh Pond; note that only RA. One is subtitled and there are no more 3D shows.



• The third annual Killer Film Fest takes place in the Somerville Theatre's "micro-cinema" on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; I can personally vouch for El Sanatorio (Friday the 4th, 8pm) and The Dead Inside (Saturday the 5th, 5:40pm). Upstairs, there's live theater in the main auditorium this weekend, and the latest ski movie from Warren Miller Entertainment, Like There's No Tomorrow. And while it's not quite this week, the Alloy Orchestra returns on Saturday the 12th with the restored Metropolis after a sold-out show earlier in the year.



• The Arlington Capitol - aside from having a BJFF screening on Tuesday night (Life Is Too Long, 7pm) and opening Tower Heist - picks up a couple of other movies for second runs: Moneyball slides over from Somerville, and Midnight in Paris from Kendall Square. Here's hoping the latter can find an audience in its second-go round!

My plans? Yeesh, I don't know; Urbanized if I can make it tonight, the previews of Melancholia, The Descendants, and hopefully Into the Abyss I'll maybe go for the Emerson screenings of Gulliver's Travels and Woman of the Year while also catching up on In Time, Puss in Boots, and Moneyball.