* * * * (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2004 at Loews Boston Common #18 (first-run)
I am a fan. There's no arguing the point; there's generally at least one Spider-Man comic among the ten or so I pick up each Wednesday, and when Anchor Bay releases a new edition of one of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movies, it's my money they're expecting. So, just like two years ago, the imminent release of a Raimi-directed Spider-Man movie with this cast filled me with anticipation only rivaled by that of a new Star Wars movie. And as much as the first Spider-Man delivered, Spider-Man 2 is even better.
How is it better? In almost every way. As much as the Green Goblin is considered the definitive Spider-Man villain, his Joker/Lex Luthor/Red Skull, the first movie put Willem Dafoe behind a rigid mask, so while the unconventional father/son triangle between Norman Osborne, his son Harry, and Harry’s friend Peter was compelling, the audience couldn’t see it play out on their faces. This time, Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) has no costume but a pair of safety goggles and the four manipulator arms grafted onto his back.
That's just the most obvious example, though. The first movie had long periods of down-time, when it just became about Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire). This one does, too, but they're better distributed, with more opportunities to cut away to Otto, or Harry Osborne (James Franco), now in over his head as the director of special projects at his late father's company.
There's more action, and that action is, for lack of a better word, Raimier. Sam Raimi is in the top tier of action directors working today, in part because he knows how to zip the camera around to give the audience the full effect of how exhilarating it must be to be Spider-Man, or how fast and how brutal the action is, while still being able to give that audience the lay of the land. He's aided by two years of advances in computer graphics technology, which gives a little more weight and better physics to things flying through the air. I suspect he's also a little more comfortable with the tools this time around, because the shot composition seems more distinctively his.
That's a great thing, because he knows just when to return to his horror movie roots to make "Doc Ock" seem especially monstrous. There’s a great scene in a hospital OR where a surgical team attempts to remove his robotic tentacles (which have enough AI to not want to be removed), and I grinned like an idiot when the camera briefly came to rest on a chainsaw, having good Evil Dead 2 memories. Raimi regulars like his brother Ted, Bruce Campbell, and J.K. Simmons are there to please fans, as well as the long, fast zooms ("Sam-Ram-a-Cam") that are another part of his signature. He's also got a real knack for sticking jokes in without hurting the movie’s ability to be taken seriously. Of course, having writers like Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (the Smallville and Shanghai Noon team) and Michael Chabon (whose novel The Adventures of Kaliver and Clay, which used comic books as a background, won a Pullitzer) doesn't hurt, either.
And then there's the cast. Tobey Maguire improves on his performance from the first, as does James Franco. J.K. Simmons plays J. Jonah Jameson broadly, but hilariously (it's interesting that Raimi goes for an almost cartoon-like feel in the Daily Bugle scenes, but can make a fight between Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus feel intensely realistic). Alfred Molina is note-perfect as Octavius, with a quick but believable descent into madness and super-villainy after establishing Otto as a sympathetic character. I admit that Kirsten Dunst didn't seem quite right as Mary Jane to me (she's much more upbeat in the comics, but a series of movies doesn't have much time to show supporting characters between crises), until her last scene.
I'm tempted to bury Spider-Man 2 under superlatives – best movie of the summer, best superhero movie ever, the movie that Sam Raimi's entire career has been leading up to – but I’m aware that this is a movie that pushes my particular buttons. However, there are lots of movies that do that, and this one does it better than the rest. The skill and craft shown by the makers of Spider-Man 2 should make this a blast even for those who aren't hard-wired to like it.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query spider-man 2. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query spider-man 2. Sort by date Show all posts
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Spider-Man 2 (again)
* * * * (out of four)(still)
Seen 28 July 2004 at the New England Aquarium's Simons IMAX Theater (The IMAX Experience)
It has, of late, become somewhat unusual for me to see the movie more than once in theaters. Heck, even after the reflex-reaction DVD purchase during the first week of availabilty when it's on sale, I'll generally leave that movie on my shelf because, gee, I've seen it in the past year and there are all these other movies clamoring for my attention. A second evening spent watching even a certified four-star movie seems like time that could be spent on something I haven't seen. Watching the movie you know you love is likely a better investment, in terms of probable return on your time and money, but watching a greater variety is better for you long-term, even if you wind up seeing something awful; you might spot an actor that it's worth keeping an eye on or be forewarned for the director's next movie.
So, why was I at Spider-Man 2 again last night? Two reasons; as the title mentions, Spidey 2 is the latest film to undergo IMAX's DMR process to get blown up to look good on a six-story screen. Also, my youngest brother came into town for it. Going to movies and talking about it afterward with someone is more fun that going by one's self. So even if the ticket for the IMAX showing is $13 (or, in my case, getting Matt dinner while he pays for the tickets), it's at least a different kind of experience.
It is, however, gratifying to see that the movie I'd enjoyed so much nearly a month ago holds up. Indeed, in some ways it improves on a second viewing; Alfred Molina's line about how keeping love bottled up inside will mess you up makes more sense when you know that Peter's powers will be going haywire later, for instance. The much-maligned scene of Peter ripping his mask off on the runaway train makes more sense, as the larger screen makes much more clear that the eyepieces on the mask were singed, and probably difficult to see through. And while I'd noticed the snake-like design of Doc Ock's limbs and how Sam Raimi and company seem to be going for a serpent-tempting-Adam vibe with them at the end of my first viewing, it's neat to notice that this is a motif he was working with throughout the entire movie.
I wonder whose idea that was. The original comic design of Ock's tentacles had the ends looking like deformed hands, with widely-spaced, stubby fingers; later revisions have given them a more octopus-like look, with sucker-looking things along their length. Was it one of the four writers, production designer Neil Spisak, or Raimi himself? Similarly, which of the writers giggled at the idea of sticking a chainsaw in a hospital OR, just so that Raimi could show that even with all the mainstream stuff he's done since 1993, he still could call on his horror-movie roots.
Come awards season, Raimi and company will be overlooked for their work here - after all, not only is this a popcorn movie, but it's a sequel. And fans of Raimi's previous movies will notice that there's a lot of references to to his other movies, from "the classic" sitting in Aunt May's driveway to shots lifted from Darkman, but these aren't used as crutches. It's a tight film, with only one screen that doesn't seem to contribute (and I wouldn't be shocked if the writers were using that cake scene to build Ursula Ditkovich's crush on Peter up for her to appear as Black Cat in Spider-Man 3). And I know I've said this before, but it's especially evident after watching The Bourne Supremacy two days earlier - Raimi/Pope is about as good a team as you can get with the camera in the action movie. As fast and three-dimensional as the action is in this movie, the audience always knows where the characters are in relation to each other and the environment, what they can do, etc. Spider-Man 2 holds up because the filmmakers worked hard but don't shove their hard work in the audience's face.
The IMAX presentation was good. There were a couple scenes toward the end where I wondered if perhaps IMAX's DMR processing was a little rushed, but otherwise it looked and sounded great.
There is one caveat, though. What I'm about to say will probably irk the people on the home theater websites I frequent, where the quest to have movies presented in their original aspect ratio rather than a cropped, pan-and-scan version is like a holy crusade, but I must admit it passed through my head. The IMAX presentation of Spider-Man 2 (like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and The Matrix Revolutions before it) is a matted widescreen presentation, in the movie's original 2.35:1 width:height ratio. That's a good thing, right? However, I did some math, based upon the stated proportions of the Simons IMAX Screen (65 feet high by 85 feet wide); the actual picture for these "scope" movies is about 36 feet tall. That's certainly bigger than most multiplexes, but not that much bigger than the largest screen at the AMC Fenway.
The first of the "IMAX Experience" series was Apollo 13, and there Ron Howard and his cinematographer, in addition to editing the film down to two hours so that it could fit on an IMAX platter (since then, most IMAX theaters have upgraded to larger platters), he and his cinematographer also recomposed the movie to use the entire 1.44:1 IMAX frame; George Lucas did something similar for Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. Some purists raised a stink over this, and apparently the studios have listened and responded. It's worth noting that these films no longer seem to be promoted as "The IMAX Experience", which is probably accurate - they don't really have the grand, immersive effect native IMAX films have, which Howard tried to duplicate by tweaking his film for the different demands and challenges of a giant-screen environment.
Consider the final scene of Spider-Man 2, where Spidey swings through Manhattan, escorted by a pair of police helicopters. Looks great, as good as or better than it looked on the best 35mm screens. Now, think how amazing it would have been if they had zoomed in, used the whole IMAX canvas, let the city and the speed just completely fill one's field of vision. It would have been utterly jaw-dropping. Considering Raimi reportedly wanted to film at 1.85:1 rather than 2.35:1 anyway, I think he could have been convinced. Of course, the question is if he and Pope could have made an "IMAX Experience" version; they would have had to either been composing for both versions during filming, or been given time to figure out how to fit their footage to a differently-proportioned screen. Given that the Spidey 2 IMAX release seems like sort of an afterthought, neither is likely the case.
It will be interesting to see how the 35mm and IMAX 3-D versions of Robert Zemeckis's Polar Express compare, as IMAX was apparently a consideration from early on. After watching the last three IMAX DMR blowups, though, I'm starting to wonder what advantage they hold over a top-line 35mm presentation if the filmmakers aren't given some license to make some changes. I've got no issue with Apollo 13 and Apollo 13: The IMAX Experience being slightly different, though closely related, works if it means the tools are used to their fullest.
Seen 28 July 2004 at the New England Aquarium's Simons IMAX Theater (The IMAX Experience)
It has, of late, become somewhat unusual for me to see the movie more than once in theaters. Heck, even after the reflex-reaction DVD purchase during the first week of availabilty when it's on sale, I'll generally leave that movie on my shelf because, gee, I've seen it in the past year and there are all these other movies clamoring for my attention. A second evening spent watching even a certified four-star movie seems like time that could be spent on something I haven't seen. Watching the movie you know you love is likely a better investment, in terms of probable return on your time and money, but watching a greater variety is better for you long-term, even if you wind up seeing something awful; you might spot an actor that it's worth keeping an eye on or be forewarned for the director's next movie.
So, why was I at Spider-Man 2 again last night? Two reasons; as the title mentions, Spidey 2 is the latest film to undergo IMAX's DMR process to get blown up to look good on a six-story screen. Also, my youngest brother came into town for it. Going to movies and talking about it afterward with someone is more fun that going by one's self. So even if the ticket for the IMAX showing is $13 (or, in my case, getting Matt dinner while he pays for the tickets), it's at least a different kind of experience.
It is, however, gratifying to see that the movie I'd enjoyed so much nearly a month ago holds up. Indeed, in some ways it improves on a second viewing; Alfred Molina's line about how keeping love bottled up inside will mess you up makes more sense when you know that Peter's powers will be going haywire later, for instance. The much-maligned scene of Peter ripping his mask off on the runaway train makes more sense, as the larger screen makes much more clear that the eyepieces on the mask were singed, and probably difficult to see through. And while I'd noticed the snake-like design of Doc Ock's limbs and how Sam Raimi and company seem to be going for a serpent-tempting-Adam vibe with them at the end of my first viewing, it's neat to notice that this is a motif he was working with throughout the entire movie.
I wonder whose idea that was. The original comic design of Ock's tentacles had the ends looking like deformed hands, with widely-spaced, stubby fingers; later revisions have given them a more octopus-like look, with sucker-looking things along their length. Was it one of the four writers, production designer Neil Spisak, or Raimi himself? Similarly, which of the writers giggled at the idea of sticking a chainsaw in a hospital OR, just so that Raimi could show that even with all the mainstream stuff he's done since 1993, he still could call on his horror-movie roots.
Come awards season, Raimi and company will be overlooked for their work here - after all, not only is this a popcorn movie, but it's a sequel. And fans of Raimi's previous movies will notice that there's a lot of references to to his other movies, from "the classic" sitting in Aunt May's driveway to shots lifted from Darkman, but these aren't used as crutches. It's a tight film, with only one screen that doesn't seem to contribute (and I wouldn't be shocked if the writers were using that cake scene to build Ursula Ditkovich's crush on Peter up for her to appear as Black Cat in Spider-Man 3). And I know I've said this before, but it's especially evident after watching The Bourne Supremacy two days earlier - Raimi/Pope is about as good a team as you can get with the camera in the action movie. As fast and three-dimensional as the action is in this movie, the audience always knows where the characters are in relation to each other and the environment, what they can do, etc. Spider-Man 2 holds up because the filmmakers worked hard but don't shove their hard work in the audience's face.
The IMAX presentation was good. There were a couple scenes toward the end where I wondered if perhaps IMAX's DMR processing was a little rushed, but otherwise it looked and sounded great.
There is one caveat, though. What I'm about to say will probably irk the people on the home theater websites I frequent, where the quest to have movies presented in their original aspect ratio rather than a cropped, pan-and-scan version is like a holy crusade, but I must admit it passed through my head. The IMAX presentation of Spider-Man 2 (like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and The Matrix Revolutions before it) is a matted widescreen presentation, in the movie's original 2.35:1 width:height ratio. That's a good thing, right? However, I did some math, based upon the stated proportions of the Simons IMAX Screen (65 feet high by 85 feet wide); the actual picture for these "scope" movies is about 36 feet tall. That's certainly bigger than most multiplexes, but not that much bigger than the largest screen at the AMC Fenway.
The first of the "IMAX Experience" series was Apollo 13, and there Ron Howard and his cinematographer, in addition to editing the film down to two hours so that it could fit on an IMAX platter (since then, most IMAX theaters have upgraded to larger platters), he and his cinematographer also recomposed the movie to use the entire 1.44:1 IMAX frame; George Lucas did something similar for Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. Some purists raised a stink over this, and apparently the studios have listened and responded. It's worth noting that these films no longer seem to be promoted as "The IMAX Experience", which is probably accurate - they don't really have the grand, immersive effect native IMAX films have, which Howard tried to duplicate by tweaking his film for the different demands and challenges of a giant-screen environment.
Consider the final scene of Spider-Man 2, where Spidey swings through Manhattan, escorted by a pair of police helicopters. Looks great, as good as or better than it looked on the best 35mm screens. Now, think how amazing it would have been if they had zoomed in, used the whole IMAX canvas, let the city and the speed just completely fill one's field of vision. It would have been utterly jaw-dropping. Considering Raimi reportedly wanted to film at 1.85:1 rather than 2.35:1 anyway, I think he could have been convinced. Of course, the question is if he and Pope could have made an "IMAX Experience" version; they would have had to either been composing for both versions during filming, or been given time to figure out how to fit their footage to a differently-proportioned screen. Given that the Spidey 2 IMAX release seems like sort of an afterthought, neither is likely the case.
It will be interesting to see how the 35mm and IMAX 3-D versions of Robert Zemeckis's Polar Express compare, as IMAX was apparently a consideration from early on. After watching the last three IMAX DMR blowups, though, I'm starting to wonder what advantage they hold over a top-line 35mm presentation if the filmmakers aren't given some license to make some changes. I've got no issue with Apollo 13 and Apollo 13: The IMAX Experience being slightly different, though closely related, works if it means the tools are used to their fullest.
Tuesday, October 12, 2021
Venom: Let There Be Carnage
A kind of weird thing about Marvel movies (mainline or not) is that they seem to turn around sequels much faster than studios had for the past twenty years or so. The pandemic sort of hides that in this case, but Venom 2 was meant to come out last year, just a couple years after the first, when three years had sort of become the traditional sequel turn-around time. I guess that when you're so locked into the idea of a franchise that you've cast the second movie's villain and shot a scene to introduce him at the end of the first, you're getting the wheels moving earlier.
Still, it's kind of weird that the result of Sony wanting a steady stream of Spider-Man-derived movies plus the pandemic has resulted in a spurt that has Regal offering a "see three in four months" deal for Venom 2 (October), Spider-Man: No Way Home (December), and Morbius (January), though I think the original plan would have still been pretty aggressive - 15 months instead of four - although maybe they've finally got some others close enough to ready to roll that it won't be a spurt and then nothing. I'm kind of intrigued by something in the Morbius trailer that ties it pretty definitively to the main Marvel Cinematic Universe, although I'll be kind of annoyed if they're basically putting something from the mid-credit tease into the trailer because, geez, who wants to see a Morbius movie starring Jared Leto otherwise? It's interesting to see the hints that various areas of the Marvel Universe are possibly existing simultaneously but mostly out of each others' way in the way that the mutants, Avengers, Spider-folk, etc., do in the comics. Although…
SPOILERS!
I've spent a few too many brain cycles trying to figure out what the timing on the Venom 2 post-credit scene is. It feels like it should be the snaps, but that doesn't quite line up unless whatever Venom was doing at the time kept them out of the main timeline for a little longer. It could tie into whatever the deal is with timelines jumping the tracks in Loki, or maybe whatever's going to happen multiverse-wise in Spider-Man: No Way Home, but it would seem to be too early for that.
!SRELIOPS
Anyway, I can't say I quite liked this as much as the first movie, but I'll probably be keeping an eye open to see if Sony is releasing a combined 3D/4K disc, because this is actually really nice in 3D - Shriek's cell in Ravenloft is clearly built to have layers, while all of the other gothic, creepy places (including the run-down church of the finale) are built to have a lot of depth and foreground/background contrast. Not bad for a conersion job, I say as the Last Person Who Likes 3D.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 October 2021 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)
The first Venom movie was not, I suspect, what anybody involved wanted it to be; I'd love to know who thought they were making a sort of sci-fi horror movie, who was making a comedy, who wanted straight-ahead superhero action, and who saw a weird queer-ish romance underneath it all and decided to play that up. Somehow, don't ask me how, the movie worked better than it had any right to, even if it was not what one would call above-average. The sequel is clearly the result of Sony trying to reverse-engineer what happened and do it again, and deliberately replicating chaos doesn't come easy.
It's been some time since reporter Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) fused with the intelligent alien symbiote "Venom", and in that time he's once again become respected as a reporter, although he naturally has to keep it hidden, which has meant a split with ex-girlfriend Anne (Michelle Williams). Serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) will only give Brock his story, which leads to the pair finding where his missing victims are buried, but also to Cletus getting a symbiote of his own. With "Carnage" potentially more powerful than Venom, Cletus will stop at nothing to look for his long-lost and similarly psychopathic reform-school girlfriend Frances "Shriek" Barrison (Naomie Harris), whose mutant(*) sonic powers have had her locked up in a top-secret facility.
(*) I can only imagine what sort of legal wrangling was involved around this character given that Marvel had licenced "mutant" properties to Twentieth Century Fox and the "Spider-Man" characters to Sony, who I believe started work on this film which is not meant to be obviously connected to Spider-Man and which is very careful to use "mutation" rather than "Mutant" before Marvel parent company Disney acquired the former. Imagine being those lawyers.
As the most noteworthy villain in the Venom corner of Marvel's Spider-Man line, Carnage was teased at the end of the first movie, so returning writer Kelly Marcel (a frequent collaborator with star Tom Hardy, who shares story credit) was working from that on the one hand and the way audiences responded to Hardy blowing straight past Eddie and Venom bantering to play them as a strange romance with Venom clearly seeing Anne as potentially the third part of some sort of throuple. Squint, and you can see Cletus/Carnage/Shriek as a sort of twisted reflection of that, but it doesn't quite work; the Venom side is almost all weird breakup jokes and the Carnage side barreling through the plot at full speed. It takes a while for Cletus to get his symbiote with Eddie not having much to do while the audience waits, and despite all the eventual CGI slapstick, murder, and hints of something bigger with this mysterious mutant(*) prison, there's not all that much going on.
It doesn't really help that the cast seems out of sync, and not necessarily in a way where it's fun to watch people who think they're in different movies bump up against each other. Hardy's double act as Eddie and Venom is a little less its own thing and more familiar beats, but he's still entertaining in doing it. Naomie Harris has to work hard to outdo Woody Harrelson in chewing the scenery, but she manages, though Harrelson is doing a fine sort of bloodthirsty creep who thinks his disdain for human life makes him smarter than everybody else. There's a disconnect between Hardy and Harrelson, though; for all that Harrelson's trying to be repulsive as Kasady, Hardy's Brock seems a little too arch and able to interact with him as a normal human being, and it doesn't quite work with how he and Venom are fighting about the latter's desire to eat brains. He should be either a little more principled or uncomfortably hypocritical.
As a result, the movie really doesn't come together until the big climactic fight, when it doesn't have to try to figure out whether all the weird stuff of the first movie is going to be subtext or just right out there, and just has everybody yelling what's got them angry as they distort into grotesque shapes and pound each other. Unlike a lot of these movies, everybody has something to do (well, Williams is kind of stuck with hostage duty, but she at least seems annoyed by it) and can be cartoonishly thrown against a wall and knocked unconscious when they're not needed. Director Andy Serkis obviously knows something about making big motion-captured performances entertaining from the actor's side and is able to bring some of that to bear from the opposite end. The movie develops a little more personality when he and the crew can lean into pulpy creepy-building imagery, and those sequences are maybe half-a-star better when seen in 3D (it's a conversion job, but someone is having fun with depth and layers).
On top of that, the movie is 97 minutes long including credits and the inevitable mid-credit tease, which is something of a relief when so many of these superhero movies routinely stretch forty-five minutes longer out of sheer shagginess. Admittedly, that speed comes from the movie not having a lot to it because Marcel, Serkis, and the rest couldn't find more of whatever happenstance made the first sort of work, but there are many worse ways of being a mediocre movie than not wasting any more of the audience's time than necessary.
Also at eFilmCritic
Still, it's kind of weird that the result of Sony wanting a steady stream of Spider-Man-derived movies plus the pandemic has resulted in a spurt that has Regal offering a "see three in four months" deal for Venom 2 (October), Spider-Man: No Way Home (December), and Morbius (January), though I think the original plan would have still been pretty aggressive - 15 months instead of four - although maybe they've finally got some others close enough to ready to roll that it won't be a spurt and then nothing. I'm kind of intrigued by something in the Morbius trailer that ties it pretty definitively to the main Marvel Cinematic Universe, although I'll be kind of annoyed if they're basically putting something from the mid-credit tease into the trailer because, geez, who wants to see a Morbius movie starring Jared Leto otherwise? It's interesting to see the hints that various areas of the Marvel Universe are possibly existing simultaneously but mostly out of each others' way in the way that the mutants, Avengers, Spider-folk, etc., do in the comics. Although…
SPOILERS!
I've spent a few too many brain cycles trying to figure out what the timing on the Venom 2 post-credit scene is. It feels like it should be the snaps, but that doesn't quite line up unless whatever Venom was doing at the time kept them out of the main timeline for a little longer. It could tie into whatever the deal is with timelines jumping the tracks in Loki, or maybe whatever's going to happen multiverse-wise in Spider-Man: No Way Home, but it would seem to be too early for that.
!SRELIOPS
Anyway, I can't say I quite liked this as much as the first movie, but I'll probably be keeping an eye open to see if Sony is releasing a combined 3D/4K disc, because this is actually really nice in 3D - Shriek's cell in Ravenloft is clearly built to have layers, while all of the other gothic, creepy places (including the run-down church of the finale) are built to have a lot of depth and foreground/background contrast. Not bad for a conersion job, I say as the Last Person Who Likes 3D.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 October 2021 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)
The first Venom movie was not, I suspect, what anybody involved wanted it to be; I'd love to know who thought they were making a sort of sci-fi horror movie, who was making a comedy, who wanted straight-ahead superhero action, and who saw a weird queer-ish romance underneath it all and decided to play that up. Somehow, don't ask me how, the movie worked better than it had any right to, even if it was not what one would call above-average. The sequel is clearly the result of Sony trying to reverse-engineer what happened and do it again, and deliberately replicating chaos doesn't come easy.
It's been some time since reporter Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) fused with the intelligent alien symbiote "Venom", and in that time he's once again become respected as a reporter, although he naturally has to keep it hidden, which has meant a split with ex-girlfriend Anne (Michelle Williams). Serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) will only give Brock his story, which leads to the pair finding where his missing victims are buried, but also to Cletus getting a symbiote of his own. With "Carnage" potentially more powerful than Venom, Cletus will stop at nothing to look for his long-lost and similarly psychopathic reform-school girlfriend Frances "Shriek" Barrison (Naomie Harris), whose mutant(*) sonic powers have had her locked up in a top-secret facility.
(*) I can only imagine what sort of legal wrangling was involved around this character given that Marvel had licenced "mutant" properties to Twentieth Century Fox and the "Spider-Man" characters to Sony, who I believe started work on this film which is not meant to be obviously connected to Spider-Man and which is very careful to use "mutation" rather than "Mutant" before Marvel parent company Disney acquired the former. Imagine being those lawyers.
As the most noteworthy villain in the Venom corner of Marvel's Spider-Man line, Carnage was teased at the end of the first movie, so returning writer Kelly Marcel (a frequent collaborator with star Tom Hardy, who shares story credit) was working from that on the one hand and the way audiences responded to Hardy blowing straight past Eddie and Venom bantering to play them as a strange romance with Venom clearly seeing Anne as potentially the third part of some sort of throuple. Squint, and you can see Cletus/Carnage/Shriek as a sort of twisted reflection of that, but it doesn't quite work; the Venom side is almost all weird breakup jokes and the Carnage side barreling through the plot at full speed. It takes a while for Cletus to get his symbiote with Eddie not having much to do while the audience waits, and despite all the eventual CGI slapstick, murder, and hints of something bigger with this mysterious mutant(*) prison, there's not all that much going on.
It doesn't really help that the cast seems out of sync, and not necessarily in a way where it's fun to watch people who think they're in different movies bump up against each other. Hardy's double act as Eddie and Venom is a little less its own thing and more familiar beats, but he's still entertaining in doing it. Naomie Harris has to work hard to outdo Woody Harrelson in chewing the scenery, but she manages, though Harrelson is doing a fine sort of bloodthirsty creep who thinks his disdain for human life makes him smarter than everybody else. There's a disconnect between Hardy and Harrelson, though; for all that Harrelson's trying to be repulsive as Kasady, Hardy's Brock seems a little too arch and able to interact with him as a normal human being, and it doesn't quite work with how he and Venom are fighting about the latter's desire to eat brains. He should be either a little more principled or uncomfortably hypocritical.
As a result, the movie really doesn't come together until the big climactic fight, when it doesn't have to try to figure out whether all the weird stuff of the first movie is going to be subtext or just right out there, and just has everybody yelling what's got them angry as they distort into grotesque shapes and pound each other. Unlike a lot of these movies, everybody has something to do (well, Williams is kind of stuck with hostage duty, but she at least seems annoyed by it) and can be cartoonishly thrown against a wall and knocked unconscious when they're not needed. Director Andy Serkis obviously knows something about making big motion-captured performances entertaining from the actor's side and is able to bring some of that to bear from the opposite end. The movie develops a little more personality when he and the crew can lean into pulpy creepy-building imagery, and those sequences are maybe half-a-star better when seen in 3D (it's a conversion job, but someone is having fun with depth and layers).
On top of that, the movie is 97 minutes long including credits and the inevitable mid-credit tease, which is something of a relief when so many of these superhero movies routinely stretch forty-five minutes longer out of sheer shagginess. Admittedly, that speed comes from the movie not having a lot to it because Marcel, Serkis, and the rest couldn't find more of whatever happenstance made the first sort of work, but there are many worse ways of being a mediocre movie than not wasting any more of the audience's time than necessary.
Also at eFilmCritic
Tuesday, November 09, 2021
Sam Raimi's Spider-Movies in 4K
When I did the 4K upgrade, I said I wasn't going to be rebuying many things that I already had on Blu-ray because those still look quite good and both the new TV and player do a good job of upscaling, so how much will new discs really get me? Anyway, I think you can guess how well that went after the first time I picked up a disc of something made on film and saw that, yeah, there's a difference. Amazon puts these movies on sale for $30 for the entire Sam Raimi Spider-Man series in 4K, and I'm all over that.
Anyway, the discs look great; movies were still being shot on film at this point and even if they were being edited and composited off a digital intermediate, Raimi is clearly a guy with strong ideas of how his movies should look, and he's not particularly worried about them having to exist alongside anything else, so there are bold colors and contrasts which absolutely benefit from an UltraHD/HDR presentation. It's a terrific upgrade.
It was also a real pleasure to just watch these movies again for the first time in years, because they're pretty terrific as a set and even the weakest of them feels interesting. A thing that really surprised me is how much my impressions of the first two movies have been a bit reversed from reality; I thought of Spider-Man 2 as the one that Raimi assert his personality and style more, in large part due to the memorable operating room massacre, but it's actually the one that nudges things closer to the mainstream after diving into the first like a guy who might never get a chance to do this again. By the time that the third comes out, it's not quite a movie that could have been made by anyone, but you can sort of see the Marvel Cinematic Universe coming. I enjoy the heck out of those movies, but there's no denying that for all that Marvel will give their filmmakers some room, there are clear boundaries and a sort of gravity that draws them back toward being able to all fit in an Avengers crossover without looking out of place. Sam Raimi and Ang Lee weren't really thinking along those lines, and it's kind of left their movies striking and memorable but also the last gasps before "counting" mattered in films the same way it does in comics.
Anyway, I was just going to log them on Letterboxd and move on, but, well, I went long enough to want these on my space as well.
Spider-Man
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 24 October 2021 Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-Ray)
Coming back to this for the first time in a while, with two decades of other Marvel stuff since, it's amazing just how much Sam Raimi is in it. There are the same sorts of comic-inspired framings and transitions that he used in Darkman, crazy montage, and cameras that zoom in to make sure that the audience can't miss something important in the scene as he gleefully leans into what you can do with a movie when everyone knows and acknowledges that it's a movie rather than trying to make the audience a generic observer. The action owes a ton to Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness as he leans into how a fight between superheroes is going to have a bunch of slapstick to it. It's an approach that not many others have gone for, opting instead for grim intensity and rocket-powered smashing through walls, but just look at the way these things are staged as characters get thrown around like ragdolls and look bewildered while absorbing punishment that would kill a normal person: They're superhuman but they react in ways we understand without grounding the action too much. It's absurd and entertaining but always right near the line where someone could get hurt in a way that wouldn't be funny at all. All of that makes for a sincere embrace of the pulpy comic book roots. Back then, it seemed like Sam holding back a bit, making the comics more in line with the mainstream films he'd been working on, but compare it to what Marvel's doing now, and it's clear that he's doing much more to drag movies toward what comics do than drag comics to what people expect from film. It's not quite one guy with a vision going for broke, but it's probably closer to that than I thought at the time, so excited to see my favorite director put in charge of a blockbuster meant for everyone.
From the very start of this one, Raimi, writer David Koepp, the cast, Danny Elfman, and everyone else are going big but also filling in all sorts of great details. From the opening shots where the camera seems to be just checking out Peter Parker's Queens neighborhood, it feels specifically like New York, for instance, and the different family dynamics of the Parkers, Watsons, and Osborns all feel true. Some of the turn-of-the-century digital effects aren't perfect, but it's okay because of how Raimi isn't exactly gonig for realism anyway. They mesh with the style and tone so that it all fits.
The amount of dead-solid perfect casting is kind of amazing, too - aside from how Kirsten Dunst and Tobey Maguire are just right as teens/young adults figuring themselves out (something Cliff Robertson's Uncle Ben lays out as a theme beautifully), there's James Franco making Harry Osborn just the right sort of tragic figure and Willem Defoe so perfectly on Raimi's wavelength that it's kind of surprising they haven't done more together. Dunst is probably the unsung hero of this trilogy, even though I've seen people hate her Mary Jane Watson for one reason or another that often boils down to MJ not just being Peter's conscience but valuing herself. The movie is filled with people who have ambitions beyond being Spiday's supporting cast, and it helps make Peter a believable underdog as he's a little intimidated and finally ready to push back.
It's a great little movie. That the folks involved would (for many) top themselves a couple years later is its own sort of amazing.
Spider-Man 2
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 October 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-Ray)
As much as this is considered the best of the series, I may like the first one more, having watched them in the past week. This one is striking more of a balance between the Raimi-ness of the first and something that feels a little more comfortably mainstream. Maybe that's what makes it strike such a chord - the movie lays what it's doing right out there with utter sincerity in a way that feels familiar, yet there's still enough style that you're definitely not just watching TV.
Which isn't to say that there's any single thing in this movie that doesn't work. It's more or less the same great cast with added Alfred Molina, for example, and while Molina has a little trouble making the leap from Otto Octavius being a mentor to him being a madman, he gets past it, and the confusion and difficulty works. This film's the most convincing and matter-of-fact go at playing Spidey as the hard-luck hero on the big screen - one always believes that the things which would make all his gifts snap into place rather than work against each other are just out of reach rather than playing as contrivances, even when they come in the form of cartoony Daily Bugle scenes.
And, of course, the centerpiece action sequences are terrific, especially the nightmarish bit with Ock's arms that seems tailor made for Raimi, not just because of the chainsaw but because those tentacles with cameras on the end are able to actually make the Sam-Ram-a-Cam part of the movie's text. The really surprising thing is that there aren't actually that many of them - the story has the confidence in itself to let the movie breathe between them. The most memorable part of the big hero moment is its aftermath, the big-city "just because we're all crammed together doesn't mean we're gonna get in your business" moment after Peter's lost his mask stopping a train from derailing.
It's a refinement of a bit at the end of the first, polished and presented to the audience rather than tossed off as one of a dozen things going on at once. There's still a lot of Raimi here, but he's playing to the bigger audience in a way that's tremendously effective if not quite his in the way that the first film was.
What I wrote back in '04
Spider-Man 3
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 October 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-Ray)
Arriving just a year before Iron Man, Spider-Man 3 almost feels like a test run for the Marvel Cinematic Universe - the 137-minute runtime isn't quite so compact as Raimi's previous films, Stan Lee shows up to say hi rather than being someone you spot in the crowd, there's more conscious attention to the film as part of an ongoing series, and Sam Raimi's personal signature is less prominent. It's common knowledge that Raimi was given less of a free hand on this movie than before (and it's interesting to watch a scene where J. Jonah Jameson is pitched new slogans for the Bugle and reminded to take his heart medications in the most stressful way possible in that light); watching it after the other two, you've got to wonder why so many people were trying to act like they knew this stuff better than Sam.
There is too much stuffed into this movie, but the thing is, there's so much that's good. After playing Peter as the hard-luck hero in #2, there's something very true in how this movie plays with him not actually handling success and popularity very well - he's not so much a bad person underneath, but staying humble and dealing with attention is a skill that he hasn't developed. Venom was by all accounts imposed on Raimi, but he and brother/co-writer Ivan do their level best to make him a metaphor for all the worst aspects of Peter coming out and scaring him; there's just not room in this story for the whole arc that includes Eddie Brock Jr. (one can mock the Tom Hardy Venom movies for avoiding Spider-Man, but it's a step something this size doesn't have the time for). That's especially true with the time given to Thomas Haden Church's Sandman, but I appreciated parts of his story more this time around - the origin sequence is beautiful, for instance, and while I scoffed at him roaring like a dumb kaiju when I originally saw the film, I get the guy literally trying to keep himself and his humanity together through sheer force of will a bit better now. Church has a lead character's arc crammed into a supporting role that's getting cut back itself.
At the time, I thought Raimi would do another despite the disappointment - there was more to do with the folks played by Dylan Baker, James Cromwell, and Bryce Dallas Howard, darn it! - but now I kind of think that he said his piece here. Spider-Man 3 is a movie about people trying to be their best selves, failing, and then trying again, and on and on, whether they're Peter Parker, Mary Jane Watson, Flint Marko, or Harry Osborn (Brock just doesn't have it in him and becomes a monster for it). Anything else he does with the character is going to seem smaller. It's a shame that the movie is such a mess in so many ways, never able to juggle all of its pieces, feeling like maybe it should have been a limited series in structure, and never quite having enough of the Sam Raimi style to match the over-the-top action with heightened emotional stakes. It's got all the pieces to be a great cap on the trilogy, but seldom puts it together well enough to be truly satisfying.
What I wrote back in '07
Anyway, the discs look great; movies were still being shot on film at this point and even if they were being edited and composited off a digital intermediate, Raimi is clearly a guy with strong ideas of how his movies should look, and he's not particularly worried about them having to exist alongside anything else, so there are bold colors and contrasts which absolutely benefit from an UltraHD/HDR presentation. It's a terrific upgrade.
It was also a real pleasure to just watch these movies again for the first time in years, because they're pretty terrific as a set and even the weakest of them feels interesting. A thing that really surprised me is how much my impressions of the first two movies have been a bit reversed from reality; I thought of Spider-Man 2 as the one that Raimi assert his personality and style more, in large part due to the memorable operating room massacre, but it's actually the one that nudges things closer to the mainstream after diving into the first like a guy who might never get a chance to do this again. By the time that the third comes out, it's not quite a movie that could have been made by anyone, but you can sort of see the Marvel Cinematic Universe coming. I enjoy the heck out of those movies, but there's no denying that for all that Marvel will give their filmmakers some room, there are clear boundaries and a sort of gravity that draws them back toward being able to all fit in an Avengers crossover without looking out of place. Sam Raimi and Ang Lee weren't really thinking along those lines, and it's kind of left their movies striking and memorable but also the last gasps before "counting" mattered in films the same way it does in comics.
Anyway, I was just going to log them on Letterboxd and move on, but, well, I went long enough to want these on my space as well.
Spider-Man
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 24 October 2021 Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-Ray)
Coming back to this for the first time in a while, with two decades of other Marvel stuff since, it's amazing just how much Sam Raimi is in it. There are the same sorts of comic-inspired framings and transitions that he used in Darkman, crazy montage, and cameras that zoom in to make sure that the audience can't miss something important in the scene as he gleefully leans into what you can do with a movie when everyone knows and acknowledges that it's a movie rather than trying to make the audience a generic observer. The action owes a ton to Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness as he leans into how a fight between superheroes is going to have a bunch of slapstick to it. It's an approach that not many others have gone for, opting instead for grim intensity and rocket-powered smashing through walls, but just look at the way these things are staged as characters get thrown around like ragdolls and look bewildered while absorbing punishment that would kill a normal person: They're superhuman but they react in ways we understand without grounding the action too much. It's absurd and entertaining but always right near the line where someone could get hurt in a way that wouldn't be funny at all. All of that makes for a sincere embrace of the pulpy comic book roots. Back then, it seemed like Sam holding back a bit, making the comics more in line with the mainstream films he'd been working on, but compare it to what Marvel's doing now, and it's clear that he's doing much more to drag movies toward what comics do than drag comics to what people expect from film. It's not quite one guy with a vision going for broke, but it's probably closer to that than I thought at the time, so excited to see my favorite director put in charge of a blockbuster meant for everyone.
From the very start of this one, Raimi, writer David Koepp, the cast, Danny Elfman, and everyone else are going big but also filling in all sorts of great details. From the opening shots where the camera seems to be just checking out Peter Parker's Queens neighborhood, it feels specifically like New York, for instance, and the different family dynamics of the Parkers, Watsons, and Osborns all feel true. Some of the turn-of-the-century digital effects aren't perfect, but it's okay because of how Raimi isn't exactly gonig for realism anyway. They mesh with the style and tone so that it all fits.
The amount of dead-solid perfect casting is kind of amazing, too - aside from how Kirsten Dunst and Tobey Maguire are just right as teens/young adults figuring themselves out (something Cliff Robertson's Uncle Ben lays out as a theme beautifully), there's James Franco making Harry Osborn just the right sort of tragic figure and Willem Defoe so perfectly on Raimi's wavelength that it's kind of surprising they haven't done more together. Dunst is probably the unsung hero of this trilogy, even though I've seen people hate her Mary Jane Watson for one reason or another that often boils down to MJ not just being Peter's conscience but valuing herself. The movie is filled with people who have ambitions beyond being Spiday's supporting cast, and it helps make Peter a believable underdog as he's a little intimidated and finally ready to push back.
It's a great little movie. That the folks involved would (for many) top themselves a couple years later is its own sort of amazing.
Spider-Man 2
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 October 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-Ray)
As much as this is considered the best of the series, I may like the first one more, having watched them in the past week. This one is striking more of a balance between the Raimi-ness of the first and something that feels a little more comfortably mainstream. Maybe that's what makes it strike such a chord - the movie lays what it's doing right out there with utter sincerity in a way that feels familiar, yet there's still enough style that you're definitely not just watching TV.
Which isn't to say that there's any single thing in this movie that doesn't work. It's more or less the same great cast with added Alfred Molina, for example, and while Molina has a little trouble making the leap from Otto Octavius being a mentor to him being a madman, he gets past it, and the confusion and difficulty works. This film's the most convincing and matter-of-fact go at playing Spidey as the hard-luck hero on the big screen - one always believes that the things which would make all his gifts snap into place rather than work against each other are just out of reach rather than playing as contrivances, even when they come in the form of cartoony Daily Bugle scenes.
And, of course, the centerpiece action sequences are terrific, especially the nightmarish bit with Ock's arms that seems tailor made for Raimi, not just because of the chainsaw but because those tentacles with cameras on the end are able to actually make the Sam-Ram-a-Cam part of the movie's text. The really surprising thing is that there aren't actually that many of them - the story has the confidence in itself to let the movie breathe between them. The most memorable part of the big hero moment is its aftermath, the big-city "just because we're all crammed together doesn't mean we're gonna get in your business" moment after Peter's lost his mask stopping a train from derailing.
It's a refinement of a bit at the end of the first, polished and presented to the audience rather than tossed off as one of a dozen things going on at once. There's still a lot of Raimi here, but he's playing to the bigger audience in a way that's tremendously effective if not quite his in the way that the first film was.
What I wrote back in '04
Spider-Man 3
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 October 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-Ray)
Arriving just a year before Iron Man, Spider-Man 3 almost feels like a test run for the Marvel Cinematic Universe - the 137-minute runtime isn't quite so compact as Raimi's previous films, Stan Lee shows up to say hi rather than being someone you spot in the crowd, there's more conscious attention to the film as part of an ongoing series, and Sam Raimi's personal signature is less prominent. It's common knowledge that Raimi was given less of a free hand on this movie than before (and it's interesting to watch a scene where J. Jonah Jameson is pitched new slogans for the Bugle and reminded to take his heart medications in the most stressful way possible in that light); watching it after the other two, you've got to wonder why so many people were trying to act like they knew this stuff better than Sam.
There is too much stuffed into this movie, but the thing is, there's so much that's good. After playing Peter as the hard-luck hero in #2, there's something very true in how this movie plays with him not actually handling success and popularity very well - he's not so much a bad person underneath, but staying humble and dealing with attention is a skill that he hasn't developed. Venom was by all accounts imposed on Raimi, but he and brother/co-writer Ivan do their level best to make him a metaphor for all the worst aspects of Peter coming out and scaring him; there's just not room in this story for the whole arc that includes Eddie Brock Jr. (one can mock the Tom Hardy Venom movies for avoiding Spider-Man, but it's a step something this size doesn't have the time for). That's especially true with the time given to Thomas Haden Church's Sandman, but I appreciated parts of his story more this time around - the origin sequence is beautiful, for instance, and while I scoffed at him roaring like a dumb kaiju when I originally saw the film, I get the guy literally trying to keep himself and his humanity together through sheer force of will a bit better now. Church has a lead character's arc crammed into a supporting role that's getting cut back itself.
At the time, I thought Raimi would do another despite the disappointment - there was more to do with the folks played by Dylan Baker, James Cromwell, and Bryce Dallas Howard, darn it! - but now I kind of think that he said his piece here. Spider-Man 3 is a movie about people trying to be their best selves, failing, and then trying again, and on and on, whether they're Peter Parker, Mary Jane Watson, Flint Marko, or Harry Osborn (Brock just doesn't have it in him and becomes a monster for it). Anything else he does with the character is going to seem smaller. It's a shame that the movie is such a mess in so many ways, never able to juggle all of its pieces, feeling like maybe it should have been a limited series in structure, and never quite having enough of the Sam Raimi style to match the over-the-top action with heightened emotional stakes. It's got all the pieces to be a great cap on the trilogy, but seldom puts it together well enough to be truly satisfying.
What I wrote back in '07
Saturday, May 31, 2014
Checking out the new Assembly Row theater with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and The Other Woman
Hey, a new theater opened in the Boston area! This is a thing I am in favor of! How is it? I checked out The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and The Other Woman to find out!
The first thing to note is that, for right now, the AMC Assembly Row 12 is kind of off the beaten path - the 90 bus stops at the Assembly Square plaza across the street in both directions, while the 92 is a block or so further away going northward from Sullivan Square (during business hours), neither of them arriving very frequently. An Orange Line station in Assembly Square is scheduled to open in the fall, but in the meantime those of us without cars will be getting there via Sullivan, and it's a bit of a hike, especially in the rain. And while there are a lot of trains and buses that come to Sullivan, but no particular one is very frequent, especially during the evening. The first time I went there, I was able to catch the 90 both ways; the second time, I walked back to Sullivan and waited a long time for the subway at 9:30-ish.
Here's the first view of the theater as you approach:
Oh, my mistake, that's the old Assembly Square theater, also a 12-plex, also owned by AMC when it closed six years ago. I never made my way out there, but it's kind of interesting that the last two theaters to open in this area are essentially replacing ones that shut down in the same area (the Showcase SuperLux opened its six screens a block away from the AMC Chestnut Hill 5-plex that closed about five months before it opened) with higher-end substitutes. The area is still down screens in recent years - the Circle closed in 2008 and Harvard Square closed in 2012.
It's worth noting that the two that haven't been replaced were in locations where you could get off the subway and basically cross the street, with a town square all around; the new ones are part of retail developments with lots of parking. Assembly Row isn't quite the suburbs, but it's still part of a trend away from the neighborhoods and into complexes. Not having seem this place really busy yet, I'm not sure what the atmosphere will be. It is kind of strange to see a whole new theater opening across a parking lot from a shuttered one (and kind of wasteful, really).
Speaking of parking...
Half-kidding here... But should a brand new theater that is all DCP from the get-go and thus never has projected 35mm film (and probably never will) be using that as its decoration? Sure, the hard drives that studios ship these days and the "play" triangle aren't exactly evocative the way film reels are, and there are a bunch of symbols hanging around that don't necessarily match what they indicate physically any more, but...
Well, darn it, I'm just kind of weirded out by cinemas that not only don't have film, but never have.
And there's the front of the place, which actually faces another building, making it kind of tough to get this picture. Near as I could tell, the theater was the only thing open in the Assembly Row development when I went there, although the Lego store would open a few days later. You've got to have a kid to get in, though.
Once inside, it's a pretty good spot. Prices are about the same as AMC's Boston Common plex, if not exactly the same. There's escalators way up to the third floor, and I suspect the lobby could get very crowded on busy nights, with really only room for two or three spaces stations at the box office and as many kiosks. There are a couple more kiosks upstairs, but considering that it might be a somewhat slower process considering that the place has assigned seating.
There's a bar upstairs, but the general impression I got was of the theaters I saw when I visited the UK: Not only the assigned seating, but how the concession area is set up:
The "Marketplace" set-up is kind of like a convenience store for things like candy and bottled drinks and the like, with standard nachos and popcorn in a grab-and-go case up back. The concession stand, then, is reserved for stuff that actually needs people to prepare it - pizzas and mozzerella sticks that need to be warmed up, and a selection of fries and hot dogs with various toppings. There's also an area where you can get ice cream or baked goods. You take all this to checkout counters, which is where you can also purchase cups to use in the Code Freestyle machines.
The new selections weren't bad at all - I had a "peanut butter brownie stack" on my first visit and chili fries on the second. The first was pretty good, although it's served in a plain cardboard box that's likely easier to wrangle through a couple more stations and a closed door than a simple plate could be but actually kind of difficult to work once in the theater. It was quick, though, more so than the fries, which were new enough for the staff to need to consult a manual. Those wound up kind of a squishy mess which I found myself trying to remove bits of pepper from. I'm on record as being a big fan of the soda machines, since it lets me put together a raspberry-lime Coke Zero.
After that's all done, it's into the theater:
That's screen #6, where I saw The Other Woman. Those first three rows show up as two-person couches when you select your seats at the box office, and the cupholders are configured that way. I'm not sure whether you can actually push the divider that is in the middle away and have one person leaning on another or getting his/her legs up if attendance is light enough to not have someone sitting in the next seat. I didn't try any of the seats in the main section, but they looked pretty nice, and the way the room is designed actually makes the seats on the other side of the aisle from the center block look kind of cool - rather than just being the places with terrible sightlines, they're designed to have a "private box" feel.
I actually really like this design a lot - these are actually some of the more comfortable seats I've ever used at a theater, comparable to the LuxLite section at the SuperLux and honestly not that far off from Jordan's (I've actually been thinking that it might be time for the furniture store to upgrade a bit; they've mainly just got buttkicker speakers as an advantage in the comfy seat race). It just seems very well-thought-out compared to a lot of layouts which often seem kind of random.
Oddly, the Imax theater where I saw The Amazing Spider-Man 2 seems much more a standard set-up with something more like typical theater seats - no couches, the seats still pretty plush in large part due to newness, generally arranged in the same way as usual. Not bad at all, but it is kind of odd for the amenities of that room to sort of be a step down in some areas from the rest, as you are paying extra, and given that the projection is likely 4K all around, I'm not sure the Imax branding gets you a whole lot more than the other screens in the building.
So, what's the verdict?
If I lived in the eastern part of Somerville or on the northern half of the Orange Line, this would probably become my default theater just by default; thus far, it's looking about as good as digital projection is going to and I'd have to go past it to get to Boston Common. I kind of like the "marketplace" set-up - it reminds me of the theaters I visited in London - especially since it can be incredibly frustrating to be stuck in line behind a half-dozen people who don't know even think about what they want until they are actually standing at the counter, and being able to just grab some Twizzlers quickly would be a real boon when running late for the movie.
One thing I do wonder about is how scalable this is - it's been nearly twenty years since I worked a theater concession stand, and I don't know how well the market area will be restocked during a rush. Also, while I'm starting to come around on reserved seating and like the crazy soda machines, they do force the customer to make more decisions than previously, and I can see them becoming a bit of a bottleneck with limited stations available. I haven't yet been here on a busy night, so I don't know how that works.
One other thing that I noted is that the actual movies playing are pretty standard, to the point where I don't think Fathom events or one-off programs like the classics AMC plays at Boston Common on Sunday & Wednesday have shown up at all yet. To a certain extent, that's expected in the summer, where the studios are pumping out a lot of stuff that will take every screen you'll throw at it, and maybe the programmers are playing it safe until they get an idea of what the neighborhood likes. I also kind of hoped that it might create a bit of a ripple effect - that if some of the blockbuster audience goes here, maybe AMC will program more foreign/indie/low-profile films at Boston Common (ditto Showcase at Revere). It hasn't happened in any noteworthy way yet - Boston Common got Locke and Aberdeen, but that's not a uptick that lasted more than one slow week - but I don't know if we'll see any sign of it until August, when the demand for everything being released becomes less overwhelming.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2
* * (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2014 in AMC Assembly Row #1 (first-run, Imax 3D)
One doesn't usually set out to damn something with faint praise; it's usually inadvertent, the result of trying to be positive about something that doesn't merit it on closer examination or only liking something that you are expected to love. So maybe what I'm trying to do here is damn The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in spite of having some faint praise: It's not good, but it's also not quite the joyless and confused exercise in point-missing that its predecessor was.
After an unnecessary flashback to his parents Richard and Mary (Campbell Scott & Embeth Davidtz), we see Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) running late for his high-school graduation, although in his defense it's because he's chasing a highjacked truck full of nuclear material as Spider-Man. Along the way, he bumps into Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx), an electrical engineer who goes mostly unnoticed at OsCorp, although that may change when an industrial accident winds up giving him electrical powers rather than just killing him outright. Speaking of OsCorp, founder Norman Osborn (Chris Cooper) is on his deathbed, bringing son Harry (Dean DeHaan), a friend of Peter's from childhood, back into town. Meanwhile, Peter's girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) is considering heading abroad on a scholarship to Oxford.
Because, apparently, none of the four writers credited on this thing remember that almost all kids, especially those as academically inclined as Peter and Gwen, have actually got their college plans worked out well before their high school graduations. There are a lot of stupid, common sense-defying things in the script because they are narratively convenient at one particular moment, from that to the terrible workplace safety violations at OsCorp to how Peter and Gwen seem to go back and forth on being together entirely based on what the next scene requires, our spending a good chunk of the climactic battle on things completely disconnected from the rest of the movie. It's one thing to believe that the not-exactly-wealthy Richard Parker apparently maintained an elaborately disguised secret laboratory in an abandoned subway station - making a superhero movie larger than life everywhere the filmmakers can get away with it beats the heck out of being too embarrassed to put the Lizard in a lab coat the last time around - but it's tremendously frustrating to see things happening without there being reasons that the audience can buy into.
And those are the flaws that are all apparent before getting into how Sony seems to be learning the wrong set of lessons from Marvel's Avengers franchise: Once again, the story in this film seems incomplete, leaving connections unmade and deferring explanations for what is happening now until later rather than telling a satisfying story in each movie but giving hints of a larger world. Things from the original comics pop up and the audience is expected to cheer in recognition, rather than because the filmmakers have demonstrated how cool they are even without two generations of familiarity behind them. It's kind of baffling how the writers often seem to consistently make the wrong choice in how to adapt the source material, changing it in ways that weaken the characters by overemphasizing how Peter and Harry are following in their fathers' footsteps because of their DNA but keeping a forty-year-old climax intact despite how it is in a very different context and isn't nearly as suited to the pacing of movies to come out every few years than monthly serialized comics.
(At times, the operating philosophy seems to be "do the opposite of what Sam Raimi did", and while there's something to be said for not repeating the same thing in such close succession, Raimi at least had a clear vision of the character, and arbitrarily switching things up from that leads to chaos. Some folks may now be referring to the previous Spider-Man cycle as "the cheesy Sam Raimi movies", but a big heart worn on the sleeve is no sin in this genre.)
There are, at least, a lot of steps in the right direction here. Where Spidey often came off as a selfish jerk in the previous movie he's often funny and downright likable here, a working-class superhero of the people. Heck, I was feeling pretty upbeat during the first scene in which he confronts Dillon in his "Electro" form; it's visually cool even as the hero tries to defuse the situation without violence (points for good characterization within an action scene!) and has the goofy visual of Spider-Man wearing a fireman's helmet (points for whimsy!). Pity that getting from the first to the second is so awkward. The action is generally impressive, too: Director Mark Webb and his stunt & effects teams do a great job of making the physics of how Peter swings from building to building feel realistic without making the audience feel nauseous and still capturing the imagery from the comics, while what's going on is bright, clear, and make good use of 3D.
The cast is limited by what's in the script, but they do their best. I'd really like to see Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone in a well-written romantic comedy (heck, let Webb direct it); just as was the case last time, the scenes of Petter and Gwen just hanging out and being together might be the easiest parts to excise from a bloated movie, but they're easily the most enjoyable to watch, and there's never any doubt that the pair are committed to their characters. Jamie Foxx is stuck with a character broad to the point of stereotype, but does pretty well with it, though he stumbles a bit on the transition to super-villainy. Dean DeHaan kind of struggles to establish a personality for Harry, but he's at least got something to do, which is more than can be said for Sally Field with her truncated subplot or Chris Cooper and Paul Giamatti with their glorified cameos.
Given that this is an improvement over the last Spider-movie, it's actually not unreasonable to hope that number three could actually rise to the level of being pretty good, especially if whoever is in charge of the franchise at Sony is looking at Garfield leaving the series and decides that there's no point in stretching stuff out any further. Even if that happens, though, that final movie (before another likely restart) will have to be more than amazing to make up for these two misguided movies, and I don't know if the studio's current Spider-Man team has it in them to make something spectacular.
(Formerly at EFC)
The Other Woman
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 May 2014 in AMC Assembly Row #6 (first-run, DCP)
The Other Woman is an utterly average comedy, but I'll cop to some affection for it just because it seems so refreshingly generous in spirit. In the same way that Frozen surprised me by never losing sight of how it was about sisterhood to fall back on needing rescue by a boyfriend, The Other Woman sets up a situation where its three main characters being rivals would be the most natural thing in the world and then makes even the airhead played by Kate Upton smart and self-assured enough to realize that it would do them no good. It wavers on occasion, but generally briefly and in a fairly honest way, so that by the end it can not only have an epilogue where the women are not territorial and catty, but it's so natural that it's no big thing.
That almost seems to catch the filmmakers by surprise; Cameron Diaz's Carly Whitten has a mini-speech at the end about how all of this has made her a better person, but the thing is, it kind of hasn't, because Carly certainly seems like a decent human being from the word go, with part of the fun being that she can be sexually aggressive without coming off as callous or bitchy. She's got a flatter arc than you might expect, and I wonder if that wasn't the original plan until the studio decided to soften Carly up because audience's often hold bad behavior against women far more than they do men (I doubt it was Diaz, as one of the things I like most about her is how relatively unconcerned she seems to be with her characters being likable). It also means that the filmmakers sometimes seem to have problems going for the kill when the joke demands it; even the gross-out humor winds up being pretty innocuous, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau never gets the room to become a particularly entertaining bastard.
It's got a fair amount of good bits to it, though, even if they don't necessarily build to the huge laugh very often. To a certain extent, it spends a lot of time getting by on being pleasant more than hilarious. It's funny enough, and while I do wonder if the filmmakers could have traded some of the good cheer for sharper jokes, that could have very easily led to something that was no fun at all.
The first thing to note is that, for right now, the AMC Assembly Row 12 is kind of off the beaten path - the 90 bus stops at the Assembly Square plaza across the street in both directions, while the 92 is a block or so further away going northward from Sullivan Square (during business hours), neither of them arriving very frequently. An Orange Line station in Assembly Square is scheduled to open in the fall, but in the meantime those of us without cars will be getting there via Sullivan, and it's a bit of a hike, especially in the rain. And while there are a lot of trains and buses that come to Sullivan, but no particular one is very frequent, especially during the evening. The first time I went there, I was able to catch the 90 both ways; the second time, I walked back to Sullivan and waited a long time for the subway at 9:30-ish.
Here's the first view of the theater as you approach:
Oh, my mistake, that's the old Assembly Square theater, also a 12-plex, also owned by AMC when it closed six years ago. I never made my way out there, but it's kind of interesting that the last two theaters to open in this area are essentially replacing ones that shut down in the same area (the Showcase SuperLux opened its six screens a block away from the AMC Chestnut Hill 5-plex that closed about five months before it opened) with higher-end substitutes. The area is still down screens in recent years - the Circle closed in 2008 and Harvard Square closed in 2012.
It's worth noting that the two that haven't been replaced were in locations where you could get off the subway and basically cross the street, with a town square all around; the new ones are part of retail developments with lots of parking. Assembly Row isn't quite the suburbs, but it's still part of a trend away from the neighborhoods and into complexes. Not having seem this place really busy yet, I'm not sure what the atmosphere will be. It is kind of strange to see a whole new theater opening across a parking lot from a shuttered one (and kind of wasteful, really).
Speaking of parking...
Half-kidding here... But should a brand new theater that is all DCP from the get-go and thus never has projected 35mm film (and probably never will) be using that as its decoration? Sure, the hard drives that studios ship these days and the "play" triangle aren't exactly evocative the way film reels are, and there are a bunch of symbols hanging around that don't necessarily match what they indicate physically any more, but...
Well, darn it, I'm just kind of weirded out by cinemas that not only don't have film, but never have.
And there's the front of the place, which actually faces another building, making it kind of tough to get this picture. Near as I could tell, the theater was the only thing open in the Assembly Row development when I went there, although the Lego store would open a few days later. You've got to have a kid to get in, though.
Once inside, it's a pretty good spot. Prices are about the same as AMC's Boston Common plex, if not exactly the same. There's escalators way up to the third floor, and I suspect the lobby could get very crowded on busy nights, with really only room for two or three spaces stations at the box office and as many kiosks. There are a couple more kiosks upstairs, but considering that it might be a somewhat slower process considering that the place has assigned seating.
There's a bar upstairs, but the general impression I got was of the theaters I saw when I visited the UK: Not only the assigned seating, but how the concession area is set up:
The "Marketplace" set-up is kind of like a convenience store for things like candy and bottled drinks and the like, with standard nachos and popcorn in a grab-and-go case up back. The concession stand, then, is reserved for stuff that actually needs people to prepare it - pizzas and mozzerella sticks that need to be warmed up, and a selection of fries and hot dogs with various toppings. There's also an area where you can get ice cream or baked goods. You take all this to checkout counters, which is where you can also purchase cups to use in the Code Freestyle machines.
The new selections weren't bad at all - I had a "peanut butter brownie stack" on my first visit and chili fries on the second. The first was pretty good, although it's served in a plain cardboard box that's likely easier to wrangle through a couple more stations and a closed door than a simple plate could be but actually kind of difficult to work once in the theater. It was quick, though, more so than the fries, which were new enough for the staff to need to consult a manual. Those wound up kind of a squishy mess which I found myself trying to remove bits of pepper from. I'm on record as being a big fan of the soda machines, since it lets me put together a raspberry-lime Coke Zero.
After that's all done, it's into the theater:
That's screen #6, where I saw The Other Woman. Those first three rows show up as two-person couches when you select your seats at the box office, and the cupholders are configured that way. I'm not sure whether you can actually push the divider that is in the middle away and have one person leaning on another or getting his/her legs up if attendance is light enough to not have someone sitting in the next seat. I didn't try any of the seats in the main section, but they looked pretty nice, and the way the room is designed actually makes the seats on the other side of the aisle from the center block look kind of cool - rather than just being the places with terrible sightlines, they're designed to have a "private box" feel.
I actually really like this design a lot - these are actually some of the more comfortable seats I've ever used at a theater, comparable to the LuxLite section at the SuperLux and honestly not that far off from Jordan's (I've actually been thinking that it might be time for the furniture store to upgrade a bit; they've mainly just got buttkicker speakers as an advantage in the comfy seat race). It just seems very well-thought-out compared to a lot of layouts which often seem kind of random.
Oddly, the Imax theater where I saw The Amazing Spider-Man 2 seems much more a standard set-up with something more like typical theater seats - no couches, the seats still pretty plush in large part due to newness, generally arranged in the same way as usual. Not bad at all, but it is kind of odd for the amenities of that room to sort of be a step down in some areas from the rest, as you are paying extra, and given that the projection is likely 4K all around, I'm not sure the Imax branding gets you a whole lot more than the other screens in the building.
So, what's the verdict?
If I lived in the eastern part of Somerville or on the northern half of the Orange Line, this would probably become my default theater just by default; thus far, it's looking about as good as digital projection is going to and I'd have to go past it to get to Boston Common. I kind of like the "marketplace" set-up - it reminds me of the theaters I visited in London - especially since it can be incredibly frustrating to be stuck in line behind a half-dozen people who don't know even think about what they want until they are actually standing at the counter, and being able to just grab some Twizzlers quickly would be a real boon when running late for the movie.
One thing I do wonder about is how scalable this is - it's been nearly twenty years since I worked a theater concession stand, and I don't know how well the market area will be restocked during a rush. Also, while I'm starting to come around on reserved seating and like the crazy soda machines, they do force the customer to make more decisions than previously, and I can see them becoming a bit of a bottleneck with limited stations available. I haven't yet been here on a busy night, so I don't know how that works.
One other thing that I noted is that the actual movies playing are pretty standard, to the point where I don't think Fathom events or one-off programs like the classics AMC plays at Boston Common on Sunday & Wednesday have shown up at all yet. To a certain extent, that's expected in the summer, where the studios are pumping out a lot of stuff that will take every screen you'll throw at it, and maybe the programmers are playing it safe until they get an idea of what the neighborhood likes. I also kind of hoped that it might create a bit of a ripple effect - that if some of the blockbuster audience goes here, maybe AMC will program more foreign/indie/low-profile films at Boston Common (ditto Showcase at Revere). It hasn't happened in any noteworthy way yet - Boston Common got Locke and Aberdeen, but that's not a uptick that lasted more than one slow week - but I don't know if we'll see any sign of it until August, when the demand for everything being released becomes less overwhelming.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2
* * (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2014 in AMC Assembly Row #1 (first-run, Imax 3D)
One doesn't usually set out to damn something with faint praise; it's usually inadvertent, the result of trying to be positive about something that doesn't merit it on closer examination or only liking something that you are expected to love. So maybe what I'm trying to do here is damn The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in spite of having some faint praise: It's not good, but it's also not quite the joyless and confused exercise in point-missing that its predecessor was.
After an unnecessary flashback to his parents Richard and Mary (Campbell Scott & Embeth Davidtz), we see Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) running late for his high-school graduation, although in his defense it's because he's chasing a highjacked truck full of nuclear material as Spider-Man. Along the way, he bumps into Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx), an electrical engineer who goes mostly unnoticed at OsCorp, although that may change when an industrial accident winds up giving him electrical powers rather than just killing him outright. Speaking of OsCorp, founder Norman Osborn (Chris Cooper) is on his deathbed, bringing son Harry (Dean DeHaan), a friend of Peter's from childhood, back into town. Meanwhile, Peter's girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) is considering heading abroad on a scholarship to Oxford.
Because, apparently, none of the four writers credited on this thing remember that almost all kids, especially those as academically inclined as Peter and Gwen, have actually got their college plans worked out well before their high school graduations. There are a lot of stupid, common sense-defying things in the script because they are narratively convenient at one particular moment, from that to the terrible workplace safety violations at OsCorp to how Peter and Gwen seem to go back and forth on being together entirely based on what the next scene requires, our spending a good chunk of the climactic battle on things completely disconnected from the rest of the movie. It's one thing to believe that the not-exactly-wealthy Richard Parker apparently maintained an elaborately disguised secret laboratory in an abandoned subway station - making a superhero movie larger than life everywhere the filmmakers can get away with it beats the heck out of being too embarrassed to put the Lizard in a lab coat the last time around - but it's tremendously frustrating to see things happening without there being reasons that the audience can buy into.
And those are the flaws that are all apparent before getting into how Sony seems to be learning the wrong set of lessons from Marvel's Avengers franchise: Once again, the story in this film seems incomplete, leaving connections unmade and deferring explanations for what is happening now until later rather than telling a satisfying story in each movie but giving hints of a larger world. Things from the original comics pop up and the audience is expected to cheer in recognition, rather than because the filmmakers have demonstrated how cool they are even without two generations of familiarity behind them. It's kind of baffling how the writers often seem to consistently make the wrong choice in how to adapt the source material, changing it in ways that weaken the characters by overemphasizing how Peter and Harry are following in their fathers' footsteps because of their DNA but keeping a forty-year-old climax intact despite how it is in a very different context and isn't nearly as suited to the pacing of movies to come out every few years than monthly serialized comics.
(At times, the operating philosophy seems to be "do the opposite of what Sam Raimi did", and while there's something to be said for not repeating the same thing in such close succession, Raimi at least had a clear vision of the character, and arbitrarily switching things up from that leads to chaos. Some folks may now be referring to the previous Spider-Man cycle as "the cheesy Sam Raimi movies", but a big heart worn on the sleeve is no sin in this genre.)
There are, at least, a lot of steps in the right direction here. Where Spidey often came off as a selfish jerk in the previous movie he's often funny and downright likable here, a working-class superhero of the people. Heck, I was feeling pretty upbeat during the first scene in which he confronts Dillon in his "Electro" form; it's visually cool even as the hero tries to defuse the situation without violence (points for good characterization within an action scene!) and has the goofy visual of Spider-Man wearing a fireman's helmet (points for whimsy!). Pity that getting from the first to the second is so awkward. The action is generally impressive, too: Director Mark Webb and his stunt & effects teams do a great job of making the physics of how Peter swings from building to building feel realistic without making the audience feel nauseous and still capturing the imagery from the comics, while what's going on is bright, clear, and make good use of 3D.
The cast is limited by what's in the script, but they do their best. I'd really like to see Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone in a well-written romantic comedy (heck, let Webb direct it); just as was the case last time, the scenes of Petter and Gwen just hanging out and being together might be the easiest parts to excise from a bloated movie, but they're easily the most enjoyable to watch, and there's never any doubt that the pair are committed to their characters. Jamie Foxx is stuck with a character broad to the point of stereotype, but does pretty well with it, though he stumbles a bit on the transition to super-villainy. Dean DeHaan kind of struggles to establish a personality for Harry, but he's at least got something to do, which is more than can be said for Sally Field with her truncated subplot or Chris Cooper and Paul Giamatti with their glorified cameos.
Given that this is an improvement over the last Spider-movie, it's actually not unreasonable to hope that number three could actually rise to the level of being pretty good, especially if whoever is in charge of the franchise at Sony is looking at Garfield leaving the series and decides that there's no point in stretching stuff out any further. Even if that happens, though, that final movie (before another likely restart) will have to be more than amazing to make up for these two misguided movies, and I don't know if the studio's current Spider-Man team has it in them to make something spectacular.
(Formerly at EFC)
The Other Woman
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 May 2014 in AMC Assembly Row #6 (first-run, DCP)
The Other Woman is an utterly average comedy, but I'll cop to some affection for it just because it seems so refreshingly generous in spirit. In the same way that Frozen surprised me by never losing sight of how it was about sisterhood to fall back on needing rescue by a boyfriend, The Other Woman sets up a situation where its three main characters being rivals would be the most natural thing in the world and then makes even the airhead played by Kate Upton smart and self-assured enough to realize that it would do them no good. It wavers on occasion, but generally briefly and in a fairly honest way, so that by the end it can not only have an epilogue where the women are not territorial and catty, but it's so natural that it's no big thing.
That almost seems to catch the filmmakers by surprise; Cameron Diaz's Carly Whitten has a mini-speech at the end about how all of this has made her a better person, but the thing is, it kind of hasn't, because Carly certainly seems like a decent human being from the word go, with part of the fun being that she can be sexually aggressive without coming off as callous or bitchy. She's got a flatter arc than you might expect, and I wonder if that wasn't the original plan until the studio decided to soften Carly up because audience's often hold bad behavior against women far more than they do men (I doubt it was Diaz, as one of the things I like most about her is how relatively unconcerned she seems to be with her characters being likable). It also means that the filmmakers sometimes seem to have problems going for the kill when the joke demands it; even the gross-out humor winds up being pretty innocuous, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau never gets the room to become a particularly entertaining bastard.
It's got a fair amount of good bits to it, though, even if they don't necessarily build to the huge laugh very often. To a certain extent, it spends a lot of time getting by on being pleasant more than hilarious. It's funny enough, and while I do wonder if the filmmakers could have traded some of the good cheer for sharper jokes, that could have very easily led to something that was no fun at all.
Friday, April 19, 2024
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 19 April 2024 - 25 April 2024
Fair warning if Boston Common is your home base, they've got a lot of screens dark over the next week, with the whole upper floor closed through Sunday and maybe half opened up Monday, which seems like enough time to install new projectors but not reconfigure theaters for recliners, but then, who knows? Maybe there's just mold!
(Unrelatedly, Kendall Square isn't showing anything playing Monday)
(Unrelatedly, Kendall Square isn't showing anything playing Monday)
- Is there anybody else who just cranks movies out like Guy Ritchie and still has such a distinct style? His latest, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare just sounds like him, and has a nifty cast (Henry Cavill, Eiza Gonzalez, Henry Golding, et al) set loose behind Nazi lines in WWII. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
Also arriving this weekend is Abigail, in which a crew of small-time criminals are hired to watch the kidnapped daughter of a rich man, only to discover that she's a vampire and they are trapped in the house with her. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common (Dolby Cinema starting Monday), Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), and Arsenal Yards (including CWX).
Multiplex Imax theaters at South Bay and Assembly Row pick up "Deep Sky", a short documentary about the Webb Space Telescope and its amazing images; it's been part of the rotation at The Museum of Science for a while. There's also Imax screenings of Hereditary on Wednesday at Jordan's Furniture, Boston Common, South Bay, Assembly Row.
Chicago & Friends In Concert plays Sunday at Assembly Row. There's an AMC Screen Unseen at Boston Common, Causeway Street, and Assembly Row on Monday, plus announced early access screenings of Champions Monday at Boston Common (Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (Imax Laser), South Bay (Dolby Cinema), and Arsenal Yards (CWX). Spider-Monday is up to Spider-Man 2 at the Coolidge (35mm), Boston Common (also Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday), the Seaport (also Tuesday/Wednesday), and Assembly Row (also Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday). Unsung Hero plays Boston Common, Causeway Street, and Assembly Row on Wednesday and Thursday. - Sasquatch Sunset, the latest from the Zellner Brothers, opens at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square, Boston Common, the Seaport, and South Bay. It is, like it sounds, about what may be the last family of sasquatches in the wild, with Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough among the players in full prosthetic makeup and, if they trailers are anything to go by, mostly communicating in grunts and other nonverbal utterances.
Midnight undead flicks this weekend are a 35mm print of Zombieland on Friday and Train to Busan on Saturday. Sunday's Geothe-Institut matinee is When Will It Be Again Like It Never Was Before, about a teenager growing up on the grounds of the psychiatric hospital where his father is the director; Sunday also has a special screening of the newly-restored Little Darlings. Monday's Shakespeare Reimagined show is She's the Man; with the 35mm screening of Spider-Man 2 later. "What's the Score?" on Tuesday is The Empire Strikes Back (not on film, so likely the Special Edition), with Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence on 35mm film Wednesday . Thursday's Cinema Jukebox is Reality Bites on 35mm.< - Perhaps the biggest thing to open this weekend, though, is Spy X Family - Code: White, a feature-length anime film that's been a hit in Japan and has its unusual trio - a spy who marries an assassin and adopts a daughter, who knows their secret identities because she's telepathic - on a seaside vacation. Mayhem, naturally, ensues. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, South Bay, Assembly Row (including Imax Laser), and Arsenal Yards; check showtimes for subs vs dubs.
Three new films from India and two from Nepal open at Apple Fresh Pond this weekend! The big one seems to be Do Aur Do Pyaar, a Hindi-language film about a couple whose relationship is on the verge of collapse (Vidya Balan & Pratik Gandhi) having affairs with foreign-born partners (Sendhil Ramamurthy & Ileana D'Cruz) only to have things go in unexpected directions. Jai Ganesh is a Malayalam-language drama about a paraplegic designer trying to live a normal life, and Paarijathaparvam is a Telugu crime-comedy about two inept gangs trying to kidnap the same person. From Nepal, Degree Maila M.A 3rd Class is about a well-educated man unable to find a job or a place in life; it plays all Friday to Sunday while Mahajatra, a caper about friends having to hide stolen money, plays one show Sunday.
Aavesham, Varshangalkku Shesham, and Crew are held over at Fresh Pond.
South Korean concert film Asepa: World Tour in Cinemas plays Boston Common on Wednesday; thriller Exhuma continues at Causeway Street.
Chinese romance Viva La Vida continues at Causeway Street. - The Alamo Seaport has opens The People's Joker, a project which reimagines the Joker as trans, with different segments in different styles, and also holds over Dawn of the Dead's anniversary run. Their rep calendar is pretty quiet, with The Mask and The Big Lebowski Monday, and Spider-Man 2 Monday to Wednesday (and maybe Thursday, since they never commit that far out).
- The Embassy is open Friday to Sunday with Hard Miles, starring Matthew Modine as a coach at a juvenile correction facility who leads his students on a bike trip from Denver to the Grand Canyon. Wicked Little Letters and Farewell Mr. Haffmann also play those days.
- The Brattle Theatre wraps Massachusetts Space Week and the Space Film Festival with Deep Impact (Friday/Saturday), 2001: A Space Odyssey (35mm Saturday), Men in Black (Saturday), and a double feature of WALL-E & Elysium (Sunday/Monday), which makes complete sense thematically if not necessarily in terms of target audience.
There are also daily shows of With Love and a Major Organ from Friday to Saturday, a very funny BUFF selection that handles its goofy "people have symbolic objects for hearts" premise way better than you'd expect. A 35mm print of Red Rock West plays Sunday, with an introduction from Cinématographe’s Justin LaLiberty who you'd think would be up the 66 for Little Darlings earlier that afternoon, but that's not on the Coolidge's site). There's a The Great Gatsby double feature on Tuesday & Thursday, with the Robert Redford-starring version celebrating its 50th paired with Baz Lhurman's flashier feature. And on Wednesday, they have the "Best Cinemapocalypse Finals" double feature (is this a thing from the theater's podcast), pairing Children of Men & 12 Monkeys. Thursday also begins a run of Riddle of Fire in 35mm, which you might have missed in the Seaport as it overlapped BUFF (it's between Gatsbys, so I guess that isn't exactly a double feature). - The Capitol has one last matinee of The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part on Friday. The Capitol Crimes show on Friday & Monday is They Live By Night, and the "Good For Her" show on Saturday & Tuesday is Serial Mom.
The Somerville Theatre picks up BUFF alum Femme, a thriller about a drag queen seducing the closeted man who attacked him months earlier. They also have a "Silents, Please!" show on Sunday, with Jeff Rapsis accompanying Metropolis (perhaps the first time I can recall this series not featuring a 35mm print); Monday's "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" noirs are Johnny Eager & Keeper of the Flame, both on 35mm film; and the "Tale of Two Studios" twin bill on Wednesday is Love Finds Andy Hardy & Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, also both on 35mm, and wrapping up the first leg of the series. There's also a free screening of "why are they building in the Seapot with the sea levels rising" documentary Inundation District on Tuesday evening with post-film Q&A. - The Harvard Film Archive is mostly Edward Yang this weekend, featuring Mahjong (Friday), Taipei Story (Saturday & Sunday), The Terrorizers (Saturday), and In Our Time (Monday). In between, they wrap the Jean-Pierre Bekolo series with Midimbe's Order of Things - Part II on Sunday evening.
Elsewhere on the Harvard campus, there are free shows of No. 16 Barkhour South Street at the Tsai Auditorium Friday, King Coal with director Elaine McMillion Sheldon at the Barker Center on Friday, and The Gate of Heavenly Peace at the Tsai on Monday.
Joe's Free Films shows a free screening of The Big Lebowski Friday & Saturday in room 26-100, from The MIT Lecture Series Committee and the DeFlorez Fund for Humor. - The Tuesday New Hollywood show at Landmark Kendall Square is The Deer Hunter.
- Wicked Queer 40 continues its virtual encores, some available through Sunday and others through the end of the month.
- Belmont World Film continues to stream Traces through Sunday, but takes this Monday off.
- The Lexington Venue appears to have Remembering Gene Wilder, La Chimera and Wicked LIttle Letters from Friday to Sunday, although maybe call, since nothing is listed on their website right now.
The West Newton Cinema also picks up Remembering Gene Wilder and holds over Civil War, Wicked Little Letters, One Life, Kung Fu Panda 4, and Dune: Part Two.
The Luna Theater has Problemista Friday & Saturday), Late Night with the Devil on Saturday, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Common Ground on Sunday, and a Weirdo Wednesday show.
Cinema Salem continues Late Night With the Devil, Civil War, Monkey Man, and Hundreds of Beavers from Friday to Monday. The Seagrass 420 Film Festival has Super High Me, The Big Lebowski and Half Baked on Friday, plus Dazed and Confused, Pineapple Express, and Reefer Madness '36 on Saturday. There's also a Night Light show of Dawn of the Dead on Friday, with it playing also playing Saturday afternoon and then Sunday & Monday after the weed stuff is done. There's also a free GlobeDocs screening of Canary on Thursday (register here). If you can make it out to the Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers, they have Villains Incorporated, in which a group of henchmen try to make it on their own when the supervillain who employs them is killed, and will also be playing Selena from Friday to Sunday.
Friday, May 10, 2024
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 10 May 2024 -16 May 2024
Festival's over and, oh, boy, the catch-up…
- The big release this week is Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, with Wes Ball of the Maze Runner series taking over and fast-forwarding decades or centuries to a period closer to the original Charlton Heston film (if it's still on that path), with a young ape curious about the world's secret history discovering a human with the ability to speak. It's at The Capitol, Fresh Pond, The Embassy, Jordan's Furniture (Imax), West Newton, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Imax Xenon/Dolby Cinema/Spanish subtitles), 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.
Not Another Church Movie takes on Tyler Perry and his oeuvre, with Kevin Daniels as "Taylor Pharry", Jamie Foxx as God, and Mickey Rourke as the Devil. It's at Boston Common, South Bay, and Assembly Row.
Causeway Street has East Bay with writer/director Daniel Yoon as a man in existential crisis and Constance Wu as the blind date who may be able to relate to him. It's been kicking around a while and looks quite unusual from the trailer.
The new film from Jane Schoenbrun, IFFBoston alum I Saw the TV Glow, taps into some of the same metafictional ideas as debut feature We're All Going to the World's Fair, this time following a group of teenagers obsessed with a cult TV show and discovering hints that they may have a deeper connection to it than mere fandom. It's at the Coolidge (where they will conduct a Q&A an accept a Breakthrough Award during a sold-out show Saturday), Boston Common, the Kendall, and the Seaport (live Q&A Sunday afternoon).
Babes has an early-access show at Kendall Square and Assembly Row on Sunday with a streamed post-film Q&A; Back to Black had Dolby Cinema previews Wednesday at Boston Common, South Bay, and Assembly Row; there's also an AMC Screen Unseen mystery preview at Boston Common, Causeway Street, and Assembly Row on Monday. Spider-Mondays are up to The Amazing Spider-Man 2 at the Coolidge (35mm w/ seminar), Boston Common (through Thursday), the Seaport (through Tuesday), Assembly Row (through Thursday). There's a 40th Anniversary show of The Transformers: The Movie at Assembly Row on Wednesday and a Dolby Cinema listening event for Billie Eilish: Hit Me hard and Soft on Thursday afternoon at Boston Common and Assembly Row. - The Coolidge Corner Theatre has a lot of Japanese stuff going on between the Ghibli movies, Perfect Days still hanging around, and Evil Does Not Exist, the new one from Drive My Car director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, in which the residents of a small town grapple with plans to build a luxury camping area (it is amusing to hear "glamping" in the middle of a string of Japanese in the trailer) uphill and upstream, worrying about the potential runoff. It's also at the Kendall and Boston Common.
Midnights this week at the Coolidge include grindhouse rarity Hollywood 90028 in one of the new rooms on both Friday and Saturday, with 35mm prints in the main room of Last Action Hero (Friday) and Desperado (Saturday). The National Center for Jewish Film begins a two week series with a new restoration of Mothers of Today on 35mm (including Q&A) on Sunday, Kidnapped also on Sunday, a restoration with post-film Q&A of The Plot Against Harry on Wednesday and the local premiere of Shoshana on Thursday. Monday's Big Screen Classic is the twenty-first century Ocean's 11 on 35mm, with that night's Spider-movie, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, also playing a seminar and featuring a seminar by Jake Milligan. There's Open Screen and a 35mm print of Howl's Moving Castle on Tuesday, and a 35mm print of Velvet Goldmine as part of Cinema Jukebox on Thursday.
It's not on their site, but the Boston Jewish Film will be presenting Bucky F*cking Dent, a comedy co-starring/directed by David Duchovny based upon his novel, on Tuesday night; tickets available on BJF's website. - Poolman has writer/director/star Chris Pine entering his Lebowski phase, playing a man whose job is to maintain an apartment complex's pool but whose passion is introducing ideas at city council meeting, recruit to get the goods on a land developer but finding more trouble. It's at Landmark Kendall Square and Boston Common.
The Kendall has documentary Little Empty Boxes on Tuesday evening, with director/author/subject Max Lugavere on-hand to discuss his film about confronting his mother's dementia. Another documentary, Who Is Stan Smith?, plays Wednesday evening. - It's another full-turnover week for Indian movies at Apple Fresh Pond. Of some local interest, perhaps, is Srikanth, the Hindi-language biography of a visually impaired man from rural India who is accepted to MIT and becomes an entrepreneur. Three are in the Telugu language, with drama Krishnamma focusing on three rural orphans who become lifelong friends; drama Aarahmbham appearing to focus on a wrongly-imprisoned genius; and Pratindhi 2 bringing Nara Rohith back in a sequel to a 2014 thriller. Bengali-language romantic comedy Poppay Ki Wedding features Khushhal Khan as aman who returns home for his sister's wedding only to find himself betrothed to a woman he's not even allowed to see; Tamil-language drama Star features Kavin as an actor with big dreams; They seem to be more conscientious about English subtitles these days if any of these sound interesting.
Chinese crime comedy Nothing Can't Be Undone by a Hot Pot plays Boston Common; it has a group strangers finding a corpse backstage at a theater and comes from Ding Sheng, whose record is all over the map - a couple Jackie Chan movies, the pretty good Saving Mr. Wu, the pretty bad A Better Tomorrow remake.
Korean action film The Roundup: Punishment continues at Causeway Street.
Anime Spy X Family - Code: White continues at Boston Common with subtitles. - The Alamo Seaport has the new film from Harmony Korine, Aggro Drift, through at least Wednesday, with the Friday night film including a live Q&A with musician AraabMuzik; it's a "post-cinema" hitman thriller shot entirely using thermal imaging. They also open The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, with writer/director/star Joanna Arnow stumbling through a lousy job, a noisy family, and a casual BDSM relationship, through at least Thursday.
The rep calendar has special brunch shows for Serial Mom on Saturday and Mamma Mia! on Sunday, Troop Beverly Hills on Saturday, and Psycho on Wednesday. - The Brattle Theatre screens local filmmaker Peter Flynn's documentary Film Is Dead, Long Live FIlm!, which looks at the film collectors who maintain private archives which can sometimes be the reason certain films continue to exist, on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon, along with a slate of other films that have been rescued and preserved due to collectors: Zombie (English-dubbed 35mm Friday), 35mm Saturday Moning Cartoons, a 35mm Rock 'n Roll Rarities Program (Saturday), Bad Girls Go to Hell (Saturday), the annual Mother's Day show of Psycho (35mm Sunday), Robot Monster (anaglyph 3D Sunday), a 35mm program of Boris Karloff rarities with daughter Sara Karloff in person (Sunday), a surprise 35mm Hong Kong movie (Sunday), Chinatown (IB Technicolor 35mm Monday), and Pulp Fiction (35mm Tuesday).
On Wednesday and Thursday, they run the pretty-great Mars Express in its original French (last week's screenings at Boston Common were dubbed in English). - The Museum of Science has added "Superhuman Body: World of Medical Marvels" to its rotation. Omnimax film "Jane Goodall - Reasons for Hope" is one of four events that will be presented with live ASL interpretation on Sunday.
- The Somerville Theatre opens Nowhere Special, although the big news is that it's Boris Karloff weekend, with Son of Frankenstein & The Body Snatcher in 35mm on Friday & Saturday, leading up to Saturday night's presentation of The King of the Kongo, a 12-part serial that was the first produced in with sound with Eric Grayson - who spearheaded the restoration - and Karloff's daughter Sara on hand for introductions, Q&A, and autographs.
From Sunday to Tuesday, they spotlight forward-looking DIY film, with the latest homemade shorts from the Boston edition of The 48 Hour Film Project. On Wednesday, they screen Captain January, a family adventure from 1924 starring silent-era child star Baby Peggy, with live music from Leslie & Barbara McMichael - First outdoor screen listed at Joe's Free Films for the summer! This year, the Coolidge's outdoor screenings appear to be digital and at the Speedway in Brighton, kicking off this Wednesday with Bring It On.
The page also shows dueling RSVP-required shows on Tuesday, with director Agnieszka Holland on hand for Green Border at Harvard and director David Abel at Bunker Hill Community College for the latest screening of Inundation District. Strangely, he has not shown this at the Alamo yet! - The MIT Lecture Series Committee has RRR in room 26-100 on Friday night for $5 a pop, and a free preview of Sing Sing on Tuesday evening.
- The Museum of Fine Arts has two film presentations this week. Petite Maman plays as part of "New European Cinema" on Sunday, while last year's restoration of Oldboy kicks off a series of "Hallyu Hits: Korean Films that Moved the World" on Thursday night, supporting their "Hallyu! The Korean Wave" exhibition.
- Belmont World Film is at West Newton Cinema on Monday with City of Wind, a Mongolian film about a 17-year-old boy who is both his community's shaman and a high-school student. Anthropologist Manduhai Buyandelger will be on-hand to discuss Mongolia and shamanism.
- The Lexington Venue has Challengers (Friday/Saturday), The Old Oak (Friday/Saturday/Thursday), and Le Samourai (Saturday/Thursday). No shows Sunday to Wednesday.
The West Newton Cinema opens Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes like everyone else, as well as Farewell Mr. Haffmann (did they not have it before?), keeping The Fall Guy, Growing Through Covid-19 (no show Monday), Wicked Little Letters, Kung Fu Panda 4 (Saturday/Sunday), American Fiction, and The Boy and the Heron (Sunday through Thursday). They also have a one-time showing of Food Inc. 2 at noon on Saturday.
The Luna Theater has Love Lies Bleeding Friday, Saturday, and Thursday; Immaculate on Saturday; Serial Mom on Sunday; and a Weirdo Wednesday show.
Cinema Salem has Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, La Chimera, Challengers, The Phantom Menace, and The Fall Guy through Monday. Friday's Night Light show is the original Django, Rocky Horror plays with Teseracte Saturday night (Full Body is, as always, at Boston Common). Indie horror film BLack Mold plays Thursday evening, with director John Pata doing a Q&A.
Friday, May 31, 2024
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 24 May 2024 - 6 June 2024
A sort of in-between week, since people thought Furiosa would blow up much bigger, but nothing really scrambling to capitalize.
- Ezra, which features Bobby Cannavale as a stand-up comic with an autistic son whom he brings on a cross-country road trip to Los Angeles, plays the Lexington Venue, West Newton, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, and Assembly Row.
BUFF selection In a Violent Nature, which is kind of a Friday the 13th movie from Jason Vorhees's perspective (a clever-ish idea but hard to make scary or thrilling) opens at CinemaSalem, Boston Common, Causeway Street, the Seaport, and South Bay.
Summer Camp has Diane Keaton, Kathy Bates, and Alfre Woodard as three old friends who met at camp as kids but fell out of touch getting reacquainted at a reunion, with Eugene Levy as a love interest. It plays Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and South Bay and, not going to lie, I'm a bit surprised that there's only a six-year range for the stars of the movie, as I'd pegged Woodard as much younger than Keaton.
Young Woman and the Sea is an old-school PG-rated Disney family film, with Daisy Ridley as Olympic swimmer Trudy Ederle, attempting to be the first woman to swim the English Channel. It's at West Newton, Boston Common, and Kendall Square.
Babes expands to the Somerville Theatre and the Seaport, already at Coolidge, Kendall Square, Boston Common, Causeway Street, South Bay, Assembly Row, and CinemaSalem.
Arsenal Yards brings back Top Gun: Maverick for matinees Friday to Sunday. The Muppet Movie has 45th anniversary shows at South Bay and Arsenal Yards on Sunday & Monday. Spider-Mondays wrap up with Spider-Man: No Way Home at the Coolidge, Boston Common (through Thursday), the Seaport, and Assembly Row (through Thursday). There's an extra-early screening of Bad Boys: Ride or Die at Assembly Row (Dolby Cinema) on Wednesday before the regular-early ones on Thursday - Maybe the week's biggest opening is Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle, a theatrical tie-in to the popular anime & manga about a high-school volleyball team, this one involving an all-or-nothing contest; it's at Boston Common, Causeway Street, South Bay, and Assembly Row; check showtimes for languages.
A lot of Indian films open at Apple Fresh Pond to fill some screentimes. Mr. & Mrs. Mahi (also at Boston Common) is a Hindi-language sports drama about a couple in an arranged marriage who bond over their love of cricket, with the husband coaching his more talented wife. Savi, also in Hindi, stars Divya Khosla Kumar as a housewife with a plan to break her husband out of a British maximum-security prison. In the Tamil language, there's action movies Hit List and Garudan. The Telugu-language releases are chase movie Bhaje Vaayu Vegam, action-comedy Gam Gam Ganesha, and period crime story Gangs of Godavari. - I think we're getting more westerns that superhero movies this summer, even if The Dead Don't Hurt - opening at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Kendall, Boston Common, and South Bay - doesn't necessarily read as traditional, with Vicky Krieps and director Viggo Mortensen as an immigrant couple whose lives go in different directions as Mortensen's Olsen chooses to fight in the Civil War.
This weekend's midnights at the Coolidge are Cynthia Rothrock in Martial Law on Friday and a 35mm print of Sam Raimi's Darkman on Saturday. There's a special Panorama showing of Butterfly in the Sky, with the panel discussing the documentary about LeVar Burton and Reading Rainbow featuring folks from public television, libraries, and bookstores. Monday's Big Screen Classic is a 35mm print of 12 Angry Men with a pre-show seminar featuring Emerson College's Peter Horgan; Spider-Man: No Way Home plays later.
On Wednesday, they head out to the Charles River Speedway in Brighton to screen Wayne's World. - Landmark Kendall Square opens Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara, an Italian film about a mid-1800 cause celebre, in which the Catholic Church seized a Jewish boy whom his nurse had secretly baptized to send him to their schools.
Retro Replay screenings return to the Kendall on Tuesday for a month of Pride-themed selections, starting with Brokeback Mountain. - The Brattle Theatre opens "Man Ray: Return to Reason", a collection of four avant-garde silence newly restored and scored by Jim Jarmusch & Carter Logan's band Sqürl from Friday to Monday. It splits showtimes on those dates with Omen, a BUFF selection in which a Congolese man who grew up in Belgium returns to introduce his pregnant wife to his family and finds his homeland very strange indeed.
On Tuesdays and Wednesdays in June, they get a jump start on the summer vertical schedule with "Peele Apart", pairing a Jordan Peele film with his inspirations. This week, it's Get Out, playing with the original Candyman on Tuesday and Rosemary's Baby on Wednesday (Get Out is DCP; the others are 35mm). On Thursday, they celebrate Prince's birthday with a double feature of Purple Rain & Sing O' the Times, the latter on 35mm. - Depending on how you look at it The Alamo Seaport is either playing Don Hertzfeldt's new short film "ME" and attaching the feature edit of It's Such a Beautiful Day or bringing back the latter with the new short as a bonus; either way, it's 90 minutes of Hertzfeldt's distinctively (and sometimes deceptively) lo-fi but strangely affecting work.
Backspot, with Devery Jacobs as an ambitious college cheerleader, gets a somewhere-between-run-and-rep booking with shows Saturday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. rep calendar also has Spider-Man: No Way Home on Monday, Tetsuo: The Iron Man late shows Monday and Wednesday, a movie party for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Down Part 2 on Tuesday, and Back to the Future: Part II on Wednesday. - Aside from The Somerville Theatre picking up Babes, they also have a Midnight Special of Black Tight Killers on Saturday. They restart "Tale of Two Studios" shows on Monday (note that they had been Wednesday), with Meet Me In St. Louis & On the Waterfront, the former on 35mm film.
Evil Does Not Exist moves up the 77 to the Capitol. - The Museum of Science has two screenings of documentary To Be Takei in the Mugar Omni theater on Friday and Saturday, neatly spanning Asian American & Pacific Islander and Pride months. They have also put showtimes for Inside Out 2 on sale.
- The Embassy has The Bridge on the River Kwai on Sunday and Monday. The listing says 4K; I hadn't realized they had upgraded their projectors, but it makes sense Landmark would have taken the old ones.
- The Museum of Fine Arts has one Korean film to support their exhibition this week - Snowpiercer on Friday - but the other three are about the Korean diaspora: Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV on Saturday afternoon (part of the Art Docs series), Minari on Sunday, and Past Lives on Thursday.
- The main Belmont World Film series is completed, but they have two more weeks at the West Newton Cinema for World Refugee Awareness Month, with Swedish Oscar submission Opponent, which features Payman Maadi as a wrestler who arrived in Sweden as a refugee from Iran. There will be Swedish pastries and a talk with Persian-American filmmaker/educator Homa Sarabi beforehand.
- The Harvard Film Archive is closed for the summer, but they have recently uploaded a whole mess of filmmaker introductions and discussions going back to 2008 to their Conversations page, and there are probably worse ideas than browsing that, finding the referenced films, and streaming both.
- The Lexington Venue opens Ezra and Nowhere Special, holding over Sight. They're open Friday to Sunday and Thursday.
The West Newton Cinema opens Ezra and Young Woman and the Sea, holding over Furiosa, Challengers, If, Farewell Mr. Haffmann (no shows Monday & Tuesday), The Fall Guy, and Wicked Little Letters (not scheduled Thursday).
The Luna Theater has Civil War Friday, Saturday, and Thursday. On Sunday, they welcome the band Negativeland for a double feature including documentary Stand By for Failure with a live performance of "We Can Really Feel LIke We're Here" augmented by visual artist SUE-C. No Weirdo Wednesday show on the calendar yet.
Cinema Salem adds In a Violent Nature and I Saw the TV Glow to Furiosa, Babes, and IF through Monday.
Friday, December 17, 2021
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 17 December 2021 - 21 December 2021
Based on the crowd at the new Spider-movie and what I've been reading about advance ticket sales, this could have the sort of opening we haven't seen since 2019, which is a heck of a tug-of-war between "theaters are probably safer than we think" and "we're not sure how contagious Omicron is".
- As mentioned, the latest Marvel movie is Spider-Man: No Way Home, picking up from the end of Far From Home and having Spidey and Doctor Strange nearly break the multiverse trying to recreate his secret identity, bringing in a lot of guest stars. Fanservice-y as heck, but I get the feeling audiences might need that to get into theaters. Anyway, it's in a lot of them, playing the Capitol, Fresh Pond, West Newton, Boston Common (including Imax Xenon/RealD 3D/Dolby Cinema), Fenway (including RealD 3D), Kendall Square, South Bay (including Imax Xenon/RealD 3D/Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Imax Xenon/RealD 3D/Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), the Embassy, and Chestnut Hill.
There's another terrific cast in Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro's remake of the 1947 noir about a con artist who uses the techniques he learned as a sideshow mentalist to con the Manhattan elite. It's got Bradley Cooper, Toni Colette, Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchet, Richard Jenkins, Ron Perlman, and more, and plays the Coolidge, the Capitol, West Newton, Boston Common, Fenway, Kendall Square, South Bay, Assembly Row, and the Embassy.
More big movies open later next week for the holidays, with American Underdog, based on Kurt Warner going from arena football to the NFL getting previews at Boston Common and Assembly Row Friday and Saturday. - Landmark Theatre Kendall Square continues the Netflix premieres by picking up Maggie Gyllenhaal's first film as a director, The Lost Daughter, featuring Olivia Colman as a woman on vacation at a seaside resort pulled into her own past by encounters with other guests (Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Ed Harris).
- Nightmare Alley is the main new release at The Coolidge Corner Theatre, but they do holiday counterprogramming with Black Christmas '74 at midnight Friday and Silent Night, Deadly Night at the same time Saturday, plus Die Hard Monday evening. There's also a more conventional kids' show of The Muppet Christmas Carol Saturday and Sunday mornings. They've got an encore 70mm screening of Inherent Vice Saturday afternoon (and Phantom Thread on Wednesday), and figure they might as well use the projector to show Vertigo Tuesday and Thursday nights while Boston Light and Sound has it set up for the big film.
- I was just pondering the other day that Chinese films had shifted from treasure-hunting to military adventure of late, but Schemes in Antiques is solidly in the former category, with Derek Kwok Chi-Kin directing an adventure about a team of experts trying to crack the mysteries around a Buddha head being returned from Japan. It's at Boston Common (albeit only at 2:15 and 9:30).
Apple Fresh Pond opens Pushpa: The Rise Part 1, an action/adventure starring Allu Arjun as a truck driver who gets caught up in red sandalwood smuggling. Based on writer/director Sukumar's previous filmography, I think it's Telugu-language. Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui continues at Fresh Pond and Boston Common.
Fresh Pond also has morning matinees of Mr. Birthday, a kids' movie about a mysterious group that helps kids having lousy birthdays. It's the sort of thing Eric Roberts does these days. - The Capitol Theatre has a single screening of documentary 2020: The Dumpster Fire in their main auditorium Friday night.
- It's the weekend before Christmas, which means The Brattle Theatre has It's a Wonderful Life on 35mm film through Monday, with some shows already sold out. They also project 35mm film for most of the "Let's Hear It for 1984!" [late] shows, which feature Gremlins (Friday), Night of the Comet (Saturday), Purple Rain (Sunday/Monday via DCP), David Lynch's Dune (Tuesday), Old Enough (Wednesday via DCP), Repo Man (Thursday), and Streets of Fire (Thursday). The Weird Wednesday show is French oddity Dial Code Santa Claus
- The West Newton Cinema adds Spider-Man and Nightmare Alley to West Side Story, Encanto, House of Gucci, Belfast, and The French Dispatch. The Lexington Venue splits a screen between Julia and House of Gucci.
- Cinema Salem has Belfast , Dune, Spider-Man and Nightmare Alley through Monday (with open-caption shows for all but Belfast Monday afternoon). Friday's Night Light Screening is Xanadu, and there's a Sunday matinee of The Polar Express.
The Luna Theater has C'mon C'mon on Friday, It's a Wonderful Life all day Saturday & Sunday (the first show on Saturday is a Masked Matinee), and a secret Weirdo Wednesdays show. - For those still not ready to join random people in a room for two hours, theater rentals are available at Kendall Square, The Embassy, West Newton, the Capitol, The Venue, and many of the multiplexes.
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