I don't like talking about politics nearly as much as I did back when I was in high school and knew a heck of a lot less. In fact, I get fairly uncomfortable when I see politically-oriented movies in a group; here in the so-called People's Republic of Cambridge, both a lot more passion and a somewhat more left-leaning philosophy are expected.
Not that I'm thinking either Fair Game, which targets the George W. Bush administration directly, or Gerrymandering, which is fairly balanced but seems a little inclined to make Tom DeLay the villain of one segment, is cheering for the wrong side. Still, my reaction to seeing both the same day is that I'd be much more likely to vote Republican on occasion if they didn't get caught doing so much of this shit.
And that's about all I'm going to say about that. After all, saying more isn't going to gain me readers and the politics that goes along with these is fairly depressing.
Fair Game
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2010 at AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run)
Fair Game is a good movie that is going to have a target on its back for all the wrong reasons. If the story were relocated and names were changed, both its issues and its strengths would be thrown into sharper relief (along with how they are inextricably tied to each other), but it's contemporary enough and the current state of political discourse is contentious enough that folks may overlook that it tells the story it aims to tell rather well, with a couple of excellent performances.
We start in fall of 2001, with CIA operative and analyst Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) using her cover as a venture capitalist to help track potential sales of atomic materials in the middle east. Intelligence isn't quite the family business, but word of Iraq potentially putting together materials for a weapon of mass destruction leads to her and the Agency recruiting her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), to use his contacts to find out if yellowcake uranium is being smuggled out of Niger. The investigation strongly suggests that it is not the case, so Joe, Valerie, and her colleages are shocked when the President announces the exact opposite during the State of the Union address. Joe writes an article in the New York Times describing his trip to Niger, and in seeming retaliation, Administration officials leak that Plame is a field agent to the press - which not only endangers ongoing operations, but multiplies to the strain on their marriage that Joe's article had created.
(Please don't send me mail about that description; it is the plot of the movie, not a definitive history of this affair. Similarly, what follows is opinions on how the movie works as drama. I'm sure most reading this far understand that, but I really don't want my inbox filled by people who think they know what sort of ax I have to grind.)
The first half of the film is an engrossing look at the process of gathering intelligence. Director Doug Liman has made a career of directing and producing spy movies that, while occasionally more grounded than the James Bond franchise, are still escapist fantasies. Here, he places the focus on an intelligence professional's primary job, procuring information and trying to form a larger picture from it. The details are interesting, giving us perspectives on "human intelligence" rarely seen in the movies, where even though the agents and assets are often quite smart, they are far from superhuman, and seeing the different sources it comes from, as well as the demands placed upon these people from the bureaucracy.
Full review at EFC.
Gerrymandering
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2010 at the Brattle Theatre (Special Engagement)
Disdain for the technique of redrawing voting districts in strange ways for political gain ("gerrymandering") doesn't unite America's political parties, so much as alternate between them as convenient. Because of this, Gerrymandering-the-movie actually has a better chance than many politically-oriented documentaries to interest a large audience. How much new information that audience will receive is the question.
The term "gerrymandering" comes from Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry (whose name, as footage of President Kennedy and some Massachusetts schoolkids remind us, was pronounced with a hard G), famously called out in an 1812 Boston Gazette editorial cartoon for creating a salamander-shaped district to benefit his Democratic Republican party. It pervades American politics, as districts at the national, state, and local level are redrawn every ten years, with very few safeties to prevent those in power from influencing the process to their own benefit. As we see in an opening montage, Presidents from both parties (from Kennedy to Reagan to Obama) have decried the process, although few politicians actually do anything about it, as it may benefit them the next time around.
Filmmaker Jeff Reichert frames his movie in part by following a group attempting to do something about it, most notably Kathay Feng of Common Cause. In 2008, they put an initiative on the California ballot that would place the job of redistricting in the hands of an independent commission, and though they have the support of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, most career politicians oppose them. The film also covers the Texas state legislature's walkout in 2006, where Democratic representatives left the state in an effort to kill a Republican attempt to redistrict the state to its own advantage. They aren't necessarily the easiest things to make into a movie - the Texas segments are all done after the fact, and the last four weeks of a ballot initiative mainly consist of working phones and making rote speeches.
Full review at EFC.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Monday, November 08, 2010
Fantasies from around the world: Kuroneko, Monsters, and Action Replayy
... and I would have included Megamind in here, but I don't feel like giving it a full write-up and thus give it apparent short shrift as a capsule.
So, three days, three fantastical films that demonstrate just how broad the genre can be: A black-and-white ghost story set in historic Japan, partially incorporating the style of traditional Japanese theater; a contemporary, independent US/UK science fiction film shot in Central America for not much money; and a Bollywood fantasy that mostly takes place during the 1970s. It is really kind of amazing that we can get all three in the space of a week or so. It's potentially a nice crash course in understanding a broad range of cinema for the person used to blockbusters. Each, in its way, is accessible enough, and can be sold as sounding familiar, but I'm pretty sure that certain friends, upon buying tickets, would say they'd never seen movies like that.
Kuroneko, as I mention in the review, is tremendously formal; Kaneto Shindo and company are very deliberate and artificial at times, especially with the ghosts: They tend never move casually; in fact, they almost always seem to walk straight lines and right angles even when not constricted by the architecture of their house which encourages that. Their make-up strongly implies a mask without being one. While writing the review, I hit Wikipedia's entry on Noh theater up, and while much of what I observed as unusual in the film was probably just Shindo doing his thing rather than consciously integrating Noh, it's still very much the result of a movie being made by a different culture. It's fascinating for that, though; it made me consider how movies work while I watched it, but without feeling pedantic.
For pedantic, I give you something that bugged me about Monsters: If these creatures are basically things that grew from spores or eggs that came from Europa, who come they're menacing us on land at all? Although Europa is the most likely place in the Solar Sytem to find extraterrestrial life, that life would most likely be aquatic, living in an ocean submerged under a three-kilometer-deep layer of ice. And to give Gareth Edwards credit, he seems to be thinking at least partially along those lines - they are shaped like squid, and they are bio-luminescent, which would probably be pretty useful in that sort of "hollow-world" environment. Of course, they're running around on land, and one has to wonder why they would have evolved legs which can support them. After all, there's a reason that terrestrial fish, octopi, and cetaceans don't have them; they're not useful. But even assuming that there's a reason for them to be amphibious - Europa has even less gravity than Earth's moon; why would they be able to run around in gravity seven times what natural selection has prepared them for?
Remember - this is what you get for reading a movie review blog by a guy who still basically thinks like a math/science person. Similarly, I note that Action Replayy has the same plot hole as Back to the Future - if Bunty changes the past, then when he returns, why isn't there another Bunty who hasn't gone back in time, because why would he if his parents get along now. Well, maybe old DocBrown Gonsalves leaves a note saying to make sure Bunty gets in the time machine, but where and when to? I mean, if he goes back to 1975, he's not the same Bunty, so there's two now. But there's a throwaway line about how the same person can't be in the same time twice - so maybe Gosalves tosses that timeline's Bunty much farther into the past or future, which potentially sucks for him, doesn't it?
(Yes, I have a couple time-travel screenplay ideas like this kicking around. Maybe getting the one that can be done as a short film written would be a good use of NaNoWriMo for a guy who just doesn't have time for a novel.)
Of course, the other way that the movie could have played it is as a predestination paradox, that Bunty's parents were never destined to get married until he pushed them at each other, and their mutual disdain is due to them being a bad match. Of course, that would not just be a lot darker than the makers of this musical comedy was going for, but it would maybe mean that the movie isn't playing up one of its themes - that love-marriages are preferable to arranged marriages.
At least, I think that's part of what the movie is going for; I really don't know Indian society close to well enough to know if there has been that sort of general shift over the past thirty-five years. It's something that I suspect would make the movie much more interesting if I knew one way or another; it's a film that makes reasonable assumptions of its audience, ones which non-Indian audiences may not fully get.
Yabu no naka no kuroneko (aka Kuroneko, or Black Cat)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 November 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #9 (special engagement)
Kaneto Shindo's Kuroneko is a ghost story that derives its horror not from sudden shocks, but from the inevitability of events. It is as familiar as folklore and often seems staged in a way meant to remind the audience of its artifice, but it sucks the viewer in. It doesn't create an atmosphere of panic, but one of distinct unease.
The film opens with tired, bedraggled samurai emerging from the woods, drinking from a stream near a small farmhouse, and then going in. A mother (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Kiwako Taichi) are having their supper, and it doesn't take long before the soldiers sate their appetites. They burn the evidence, but a black cat chances upon the bodies. Later, a palace samurai happens upon a beautiful woman near Rajamon gate; he offers to protect her as she walks through the woods, only to find he's been lured into a trap. Many more samurai perish; the lord demands that Raiko (Kei Sato), the head of his army, get to the bottom of it. This, he decides, is a job for "Gintoki of the Glade" (Kichiemon Nakamura), the sole survivor or a battle in the north. Gintoki has his own mystery to solve, though - what happened to his mother Yone and his wife Shige when their home burned a year ago.
Though a ghost story, Kuroneko is certainly an art-house film by today's standards, and probably the standards of its time (originally released in 1968 Japan, a restored 35mm print is currently touring North America). Its sets and cinematography sometimes bring to mind a stage production more than those associated with film, a feeling enhanced by the stiff posture and occasionally flat, declarative manner of speech (which likely extends beyond period accuracy). Shindo will show things to the audience for a few seconds longer than need be to get the point across, or change from a full set to a plain black background with a smoke machine running. It's a deliberate formalism, likely more than a bit foreign for western audiences, but often fascinating and engrossing to watch. It enhances the folkloric feel of the story without relying on crutches like narration or captioning.
Full review at EFC.
Monsters
* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 November 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run)
Movies like Monsters often get graded on a curve because of how much they do with relatively little. Gareth Edwards shot it guerrilla-style and had to cram a fair amount of effects shots into a five or six-figure budget, but put together a polished and entertaining movie, and that's well worth celebrating. The end result has its flaws, but to put that achievement in perspective, he's made a better movie than others have with a thousand times the resources.
A probe sent to Europa (a moon of Jupiter) to gather samples crashed in northern Mexico six years ago, and wouldn't you know it, not only is there life on Europa, but it grows to the size of five-story buildings. Photojournalist Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) is getting pictures of the devastation when his publisher tells him to check on his daughter, Samantha Wynden (Whitney Able), and then get her home safely. However, there's no direct route between Mexico and the U.S. any more - the creatures' migration patterns make the entire northern part of the country unsafe - so they have to make their way to the coast and the last ferry out - and then, when that fails, up the river and over land.
Though it involves gas masks, alien megafauna, and tramping through the jungle under the dubious protection of men with guns, Monsters's formula is as much romance as kaiju horror. It is, when you get down to it, less about trying to find a way to defeat these marauding beasts than about a pair of intelligent people meeting by chance and getting to know each other. They both have things that they're initially reluctant to talk about - Andrew his estrangement from his son, Sam her distance from her family and fiancé - but they've got nothing but time to talk and a simmering attraction despite Sam being engaged and a certain amount of class envy on Andrew's part.
Full review at EFC.
Action Replayy
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 November 2010 at Entertainment Cinemas Fresh Pond #5 (first-run Bollywood)
Western movie fans may have some doubts about the provenance of Vipul Amrutlal Shah's new film, Action Replayy. It's an adaptation of a 1994 play with almost the same name (the play spells it correctly), although Warner Brothers, apparently not aware of this, made vague comments earlier this year about their lawyers being ready if it turned out to be a remake of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Seeing the movie, it appears Universal might have more of a case vis-a-vis Back to the Future. Probably not, though - the basic story has been used in a lot of places, and Action Replayy would be a much better movie if it had ripped off some details from Robert Zemeckis's film.
Bunty (Aditya Roy Kapoor) is a good-looking young man with a beautiful, outgoing girlfriend, Tanya (Sudeepa Singh), and he'd like things to stay that way; his constantly-bickering parents certainly doesn't suggest that he'd be happy after marriage. After a particularly ugly fight at their 33rd anniversary party, Bunty decides to fix things. Fortunately, Tanya's grandfather, Professor Anthony Gonsalves (Randhir Kapoor), has invented a time machine, which Bunty uses to go back to 1975, where father Kishen (Akshay Kumar) is a milksop and mother Mala (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) is a bully, with the goal of making a love-marriage out of the one Kishen's father (Om Puri) and Mala's mother (Kirron Kher) had arranged.
Action Replayy isn't a fatally flawed movie, but it's one that frequently feels somewhat off-kilter. There are numerous examples of how, somewhere between the script and the editing room, the filmmakers make some odd choices about what is going to stay in and what was going to go out. For instance, when the professor is explaining his time machine to Bunty, the director and cinematographer frame the shot so the Bunty's phone is in the foreground, recording it, and we see the professor on the device's screen; it's a strange and awkward enough shot that one expects the video to be played back later, perhaps to convince the younger Gonsalves that he did in fact invent time travel Doc Brown-style. Doesn't happen. Similarly, when we first see Mala's friend Mona (Neha Dhupia) in the past, it's clear that she's attracted to Bunty, but the movie never does anything with that, at least not until the film is nearly over.
Full review at EFC.
So, three days, three fantastical films that demonstrate just how broad the genre can be: A black-and-white ghost story set in historic Japan, partially incorporating the style of traditional Japanese theater; a contemporary, independent US/UK science fiction film shot in Central America for not much money; and a Bollywood fantasy that mostly takes place during the 1970s. It is really kind of amazing that we can get all three in the space of a week or so. It's potentially a nice crash course in understanding a broad range of cinema for the person used to blockbusters. Each, in its way, is accessible enough, and can be sold as sounding familiar, but I'm pretty sure that certain friends, upon buying tickets, would say they'd never seen movies like that.
Kuroneko, as I mention in the review, is tremendously formal; Kaneto Shindo and company are very deliberate and artificial at times, especially with the ghosts: They tend never move casually; in fact, they almost always seem to walk straight lines and right angles even when not constricted by the architecture of their house which encourages that. Their make-up strongly implies a mask without being one. While writing the review, I hit Wikipedia's entry on Noh theater up, and while much of what I observed as unusual in the film was probably just Shindo doing his thing rather than consciously integrating Noh, it's still very much the result of a movie being made by a different culture. It's fascinating for that, though; it made me consider how movies work while I watched it, but without feeling pedantic.
For pedantic, I give you something that bugged me about Monsters: If these creatures are basically things that grew from spores or eggs that came from Europa, who come they're menacing us on land at all? Although Europa is the most likely place in the Solar Sytem to find extraterrestrial life, that life would most likely be aquatic, living in an ocean submerged under a three-kilometer-deep layer of ice. And to give Gareth Edwards credit, he seems to be thinking at least partially along those lines - they are shaped like squid, and they are bio-luminescent, which would probably be pretty useful in that sort of "hollow-world" environment. Of course, they're running around on land, and one has to wonder why they would have evolved legs which can support them. After all, there's a reason that terrestrial fish, octopi, and cetaceans don't have them; they're not useful. But even assuming that there's a reason for them to be amphibious - Europa has even less gravity than Earth's moon; why would they be able to run around in gravity seven times what natural selection has prepared them for?
Remember - this is what you get for reading a movie review blog by a guy who still basically thinks like a math/science person. Similarly, I note that Action Replayy has the same plot hole as Back to the Future - if Bunty changes the past, then when he returns, why isn't there another Bunty who hasn't gone back in time, because why would he if his parents get along now. Well, maybe old Doc
(Yes, I have a couple time-travel screenplay ideas like this kicking around. Maybe getting the one that can be done as a short film written would be a good use of NaNoWriMo for a guy who just doesn't have time for a novel.)
Of course, the other way that the movie could have played it is as a predestination paradox, that Bunty's parents were never destined to get married until he pushed them at each other, and their mutual disdain is due to them being a bad match. Of course, that would not just be a lot darker than the makers of this musical comedy was going for, but it would maybe mean that the movie isn't playing up one of its themes - that love-marriages are preferable to arranged marriages.
At least, I think that's part of what the movie is going for; I really don't know Indian society close to well enough to know if there has been that sort of general shift over the past thirty-five years. It's something that I suspect would make the movie much more interesting if I knew one way or another; it's a film that makes reasonable assumptions of its audience, ones which non-Indian audiences may not fully get.
Yabu no naka no kuroneko (aka Kuroneko, or Black Cat)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 November 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #9 (special engagement)
Kaneto Shindo's Kuroneko is a ghost story that derives its horror not from sudden shocks, but from the inevitability of events. It is as familiar as folklore and often seems staged in a way meant to remind the audience of its artifice, but it sucks the viewer in. It doesn't create an atmosphere of panic, but one of distinct unease.
The film opens with tired, bedraggled samurai emerging from the woods, drinking from a stream near a small farmhouse, and then going in. A mother (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Kiwako Taichi) are having their supper, and it doesn't take long before the soldiers sate their appetites. They burn the evidence, but a black cat chances upon the bodies. Later, a palace samurai happens upon a beautiful woman near Rajamon gate; he offers to protect her as she walks through the woods, only to find he's been lured into a trap. Many more samurai perish; the lord demands that Raiko (Kei Sato), the head of his army, get to the bottom of it. This, he decides, is a job for "Gintoki of the Glade" (Kichiemon Nakamura), the sole survivor or a battle in the north. Gintoki has his own mystery to solve, though - what happened to his mother Yone and his wife Shige when their home burned a year ago.
Though a ghost story, Kuroneko is certainly an art-house film by today's standards, and probably the standards of its time (originally released in 1968 Japan, a restored 35mm print is currently touring North America). Its sets and cinematography sometimes bring to mind a stage production more than those associated with film, a feeling enhanced by the stiff posture and occasionally flat, declarative manner of speech (which likely extends beyond period accuracy). Shindo will show things to the audience for a few seconds longer than need be to get the point across, or change from a full set to a plain black background with a smoke machine running. It's a deliberate formalism, likely more than a bit foreign for western audiences, but often fascinating and engrossing to watch. It enhances the folkloric feel of the story without relying on crutches like narration or captioning.
Full review at EFC.
Monsters
* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 November 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run)
Movies like Monsters often get graded on a curve because of how much they do with relatively little. Gareth Edwards shot it guerrilla-style and had to cram a fair amount of effects shots into a five or six-figure budget, but put together a polished and entertaining movie, and that's well worth celebrating. The end result has its flaws, but to put that achievement in perspective, he's made a better movie than others have with a thousand times the resources.
A probe sent to Europa (a moon of Jupiter) to gather samples crashed in northern Mexico six years ago, and wouldn't you know it, not only is there life on Europa, but it grows to the size of five-story buildings. Photojournalist Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) is getting pictures of the devastation when his publisher tells him to check on his daughter, Samantha Wynden (Whitney Able), and then get her home safely. However, there's no direct route between Mexico and the U.S. any more - the creatures' migration patterns make the entire northern part of the country unsafe - so they have to make their way to the coast and the last ferry out - and then, when that fails, up the river and over land.
Though it involves gas masks, alien megafauna, and tramping through the jungle under the dubious protection of men with guns, Monsters's formula is as much romance as kaiju horror. It is, when you get down to it, less about trying to find a way to defeat these marauding beasts than about a pair of intelligent people meeting by chance and getting to know each other. They both have things that they're initially reluctant to talk about - Andrew his estrangement from his son, Sam her distance from her family and fiancé - but they've got nothing but time to talk and a simmering attraction despite Sam being engaged and a certain amount of class envy on Andrew's part.
Full review at EFC.
Action Replayy
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 November 2010 at Entertainment Cinemas Fresh Pond #5 (first-run Bollywood)
Western movie fans may have some doubts about the provenance of Vipul Amrutlal Shah's new film, Action Replayy. It's an adaptation of a 1994 play with almost the same name (the play spells it correctly), although Warner Brothers, apparently not aware of this, made vague comments earlier this year about their lawyers being ready if it turned out to be a remake of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Seeing the movie, it appears Universal might have more of a case vis-a-vis Back to the Future. Probably not, though - the basic story has been used in a lot of places, and Action Replayy would be a much better movie if it had ripped off some details from Robert Zemeckis's film.
Bunty (Aditya Roy Kapoor) is a good-looking young man with a beautiful, outgoing girlfriend, Tanya (Sudeepa Singh), and he'd like things to stay that way; his constantly-bickering parents certainly doesn't suggest that he'd be happy after marriage. After a particularly ugly fight at their 33rd anniversary party, Bunty decides to fix things. Fortunately, Tanya's grandfather, Professor Anthony Gonsalves (Randhir Kapoor), has invented a time machine, which Bunty uses to go back to 1975, where father Kishen (Akshay Kumar) is a milksop and mother Mala (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) is a bully, with the goal of making a love-marriage out of the one Kishen's father (Om Puri) and Mala's mother (Kirron Kher) had arranged.
Action Replayy isn't a fatally flawed movie, but it's one that frequently feels somewhat off-kilter. There are numerous examples of how, somewhere between the script and the editing room, the filmmakers make some odd choices about what is going to stay in and what was going to go out. For instance, when the professor is explaining his time machine to Bunty, the director and cinematographer frame the shot so the Bunty's phone is in the foreground, recording it, and we see the professor on the device's screen; it's a strange and awkward enough shot that one expects the video to be played back later, perhaps to convince the younger Gonsalves that he did in fact invent time travel Doc Brown-style. Doesn't happen. Similarly, when we first see Mala's friend Mona (Neha Dhupia) in the past, it's clear that she's attracted to Bunty, but the movie never does anything with that, at least not until the film is nearly over.
Full review at EFC.
Thursday, November 04, 2010
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 5 November - 11 November
It's November, which is sort of like May in that studios tend to wake up and stop screwing around, both with award-worthy films and blockbusters, as folks are either making best-of lists (for the high-class stuff) or finding more excuses to go to the movies (days off, holidays, it's too chilly and miserable to do warm-weather activities but not yet worth barricading oneself in the house and hibernating).
- Before getting to the blockbusters, let's start with the Brattle, which has a tribute close to my heart on Wednesday and Thursday (10-11 November) with Paprika. It's what looks to be the last film by Satoshi Kon, who lost a battle with pancreatic cancer earlier this year. It's a devastating loss, as Kon made animated films for adults in a way that few others did, even in his native Japan; his films are mature, rather than just filled with R-rated content (although, interestingly, the one he was working on at the time of his death was family-friendly). Paprika is a great movie, well worth seeing on a big screen even if you've got it on Blu-ray.
Before that, they'll be spending the weekend alternating shows of the documentary Gerrymandering (which, I remember from junior-high social studies, is the practice of assigning voting districts to achieve a political end) and Edgar Wright's extremely fun Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. It's a worthy adaptation of source material I loved, and Mr. Wright will be at the theater Saturday night to introduce the film, maybe take a few questions afterward, and then present a screening of Flash Gordon afterward. Monday is the next entry in the CineCaché series, which has not been nailed down yet, but the folks I talked to the other night seem to feel that they've got winners on their hands for the rest of the year. - A few big movies open up on Friday. The most screens seem to be going to Due Date, the big Robert Downey Jr./Zack Galifianakis comedy that looks a lot like a riff on Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. I feel somewhat sad that the previews seem to have mostly obscured Michelle Monaghan being in the movie, although it's probably representative of her actual screen time. This makes me sad, because I wouldn't even be thinking of whether or not I could fit it in if it was sold to me as a Kiss Kiss Bang Bang reunion.
Also opening on a ton of screens, including most of the 3-D ones, is Megamind, which looks like it'll be in the Monsters Vs. Aliens category of DreamWorks Animation pictures: Fun, well-rendered, with a voice cast that has stars who are noteworthy in live action but really don't have distinctive voices. Also, if you're particular on the format you see it in, choose your theater accordingly: It's playing in 2-D at Fresh Pond and Fenway; Real-D digital 3-D at Fresh Pond, Fenway, Harvard Square, and Boston Common; IMAX-branded digital 3-D at Boston Common; and genuine on-giant-film IMAX at Jordan's Furniture. It'll likely only last a couple of weeks on the IMAX screens, what with Harry Potter 7 due for release on the 19th.
Huh - this is the first time I can remember the same movie opening at both Harvard Square and Fresh Pond. That explains why it didn't show up at the Arlington Capitol despite being in their "coming soon" email last week; even if regional exclusives aren't being enforced, that would be a lot of screens within a couple miles or so. - You can tell it's getting close to Oscar time when the openings at mainstream and boutique houses start to overlap. Take Fair Game, a movie directed by Doug Liman with a pretty A-list cast; it's opening at Boston Common, the Coolidge, and the Kendall this week, although I suspect it may move to more mainstream theaters in the coming weeks - indeed, it wasn't on the Kendall's "coming soon" list earlier in the week, suggesting that they only picked it up when neither Harvard Square nor Fresh Pond booked it (Conviction is also sticking around despite being labeled "Must End Thursday!" on their site earlier this week, knocking Hornet's Nest down to one theater rather than two and Welcome to the Rileys down to one matinee per day). For Colored Girls (aw, why not stick with "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf" as the title?) is only playing at more mainstream plexes (Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway), but it's getting much better buzz than Tyler Perry films usually get.
Also worth mentioning: Despite my pessimism at only seeing four other people in the theater when I went to see Aftershock last weekend, it's sticking around with an early matinee and a late show for a few more days, at least, though I suspect it's just occupying space until Morning Glories opens Wednesday. - Even aside from Fair Game, there's a fairly mainstream vibe to the Kendall this week - two of the movies they're opening seem like they certainly could play the multiplexes. Four Lions is a hilarious slob comedy, albeit one in which the comedic morons happen to be prospective suicide bombers. I saw it at a preview Tuesday night, and it is well worth dropping cash on. Also opening is Monsters, a sci-fi movie notable for apparently being fairly polished on a low budget and being as much a romance as a post-apocalyptic thriller. The one-week warning is attached to a more conventional boutique film, Vision, a German film about a nun who was also a scholar and healer even before she started believing that God spoke with her directly.
- The Indian movies at Fresh Pond turn over this weekend. I've got no idea what Golmaal 3 is, but that the series has made it to a third entry probably means it's got some fans and is doing something right. The other Bollywood screen will be used for Action Replayy, which looks like a Hindi riff on Back to the Future with a man using a time machine to make sure that his folks get together in the flashy, colorful 1970s. I'll probably check it out, because it's sci-fi-ish and co-stars Aishwarya Rai. Plus, if you think I either didn't notice the boost in hits I got from that review of Endhiran or don't want another, you are sadly mistaken.
- I'd like to apologize to the Boston Jewish Film Festival for only noting their first screening at the MFA last week. They opened at other locations a day or two before that, including at the Coolidge, where they will take up residence in the main auditorium for most of this week. In addition to the MFA and Coolidge, the festival is having screenings at a couple other venues that us T-bound folks have trouble reaching (such as West Newton and Danvers), so when you plug titles into Festival Genius, make sure you can get there.
The MFA also continues screening Hyman Bloom: The Beauty of All Things and Johnny Mad Dog at odd intervals.
In addition to the BJFF, the Coolidge has a few other activities going on this weekend: The 5+ hour cut of Assayas's Carlos has been extended through Saturday, there will be a Talk Cinema preview of Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer on Sunday morning, and the night-owls can go to midnight showings of Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation on Friday and Saturday. It does not appear to be the same program I saw back in February at the Regent; the Coolidge lists their line-up here. - And speaking of the Regent, they've got a couple screenings this week: Please Remove Your Shoes, a documentary on airport security (and secuirty theater) that played the Boston Film Festival (but which I missed because documentaries basically got hidden in the afternoon), plays Thursday evening. An encore of last Thursday evening's film, Beneath the Blue, plays Sunday afternoon.
(And if you like dolphins, the Aquarium swapped "Dolphins & Whales: Tribes of the Deep" into their IMAX rotation at the start of the month, at the expense of "Ultimate Wave 3D". "Hubble 3D", "Under the Sea 3D", "Sea Rex 3D", and evening shows of Inception also continue.) - The Harvard Film Archive has guests again this weekend: German filmmaker Harun Farocki on Friday and Saturday, with Portugese filmmaker Pedro Costa in town on Sunday with his new film, Ne Change Rien. Monday wraps up their Robert Gardner restrospective with Forest of Bliss.
- And, finally, Emerson presents a weekend of auteur movie stars: On Friday and Saturday night, an episode of Godard's L'histoire du Cinéma follows Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons. Saturday afternoon and Sunday night, they shift gears and present Jerry Lewis in The Errand Boy.
CineCaché #3: Four Lions
(Devin Faraci of Badass Digest/Drafthouse Pictures and writer/director Christopher Morris)
Sooner or later, CineCaché is going to get its feet under it, but this preview of Four Lions was certainly the best-attended yet. Part of this was because it was also promoted by The Boston Underground Film Festival, the tickets were free, and Drafthouse has been working hard to get the word out about this movie. It will be very interesting to see how well this promotional work scales come Friday, when it's released in the top ten or so markets. It's one thing to pack a 200-person theater with the folks on your mailing lists for one screening; getting a broad audience to see your weird film that's showing five times a day is something else.
But, if anyone can do it, it might be the Drafthouse people. As much as I like the Alamo Drafthouse - I'm seriously thinking about going there again next year, perhaps for Fantastic Fest - and think that they're one of the exhibitors that really gets the challenges that today presents in getting people to go to the movies (in short, you have to make your theater a destination worth paying for), they're probably not quite the magical group that enthusiasts often portray them to be, and distribution has clobbered a lot of well-financed, well-meaning people. Evokative Films out of Montreal are doing much the same thing as Drafthouse, and they're asking for help.
I do find it curious that neither the trailers I've seen at the Kendall nor the print that screened at the Brattle has had a Drafthouse vanity card. I suspect that the Alamo Drafthouse brand isn't quite as well-known outside of Texas as you might think from reading film sites on the internet, but it seems like they might want to build their brand early, unless the material in Four Lions is more hot-button than they'd like. As much as it's cool that they're starting with a terrorist comedy, they may not want to be defined by the terrorist comedy.
If there's any justice, they won't be - as audacious as Four Lions is, it's twice as funny. And while I say this in the review itself, it's worth mentioning here, not as a critique of the film, but in terms of its subject matter: Mockery is in many ways the best response to something horrible. Laughing at a thing diminishes its power over you. During his introduction and Q&A, director Christopher Morris talked about how much of what happens in Four Lions came from watching trials or talking to policemen and reporters who had dealt with would-be terrorists - many of them are just not that bright, or able. The messed-up young men far outnumber the masterminds, and in many ways that makes me hate the leaders even more for how they twist the normal frustrations of the young and their faith in a philosophy meant to provide assurance and peace.
Laugh at them. This stuff is ridiculous and should be treated as such.
Four Lions
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 2 November 2010 at the Brattle Theatre (CineCaché)
Before getting upset at the very existence of terrorist comedy Four Lions, remember one thing: Most criminals are idiots. If they were smart, they'd likely be putting their talents to use doing something much more lucrative with much less risk of injury and/or incarceration. This applies to heinous as well as petty crimes, perhaps even more so, as using the clever ones to deliver a suicide bomb is not great use of resources. The guys stumbling through this movie are definitely not the smart ones, but they are hilariously dim.
Omar (Riz Ahmed) isn't quite so dim as the others. Of Pakistani descent and living in the north of England with his supportive wife Sophia (Preeya Kalidas) and son Mahmood (Mohammad Aqil), it's not clear why he's dedicated to jihad, but he is. He and his friend Waj (Kayvan Novak) go to Pakistan for training, which doesn't go well, and when the come back, the other members of his cell have been busy - Fessal (Adeel Akhtar) has obtained the raw materials for homemade bombs, and Barry (Nigel Lindsay) has recruited a new member to their cause, Hassan (Arsher Ali). They're about to get serious, even though they really shouldn't be crossing the street unattended, let alone working with explosives.
This leads to some dark, dark comedy, although perhaps not all that much darker than British comedies from Kind Hearts and Coronets to A Fish Called Wanda. The often-morbid slapstick complements some occasional sharp satire and points worth pondering - such as the contrast between Omar and his peaceful brother Ahmed (Wasim Zakir), who is nevertheless far more observant of the Sharia traditions. It's not completely nihilistic humor - while director Christopher Morris and his three co-writers get the audience to laugh at some terrible things, they never lose sight that what these guys are doing is as potentially tragic as it is absurd.
Full review at EFC.
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
This Week In Tickets: 25 October 2010 to 31 October 2010
A little slow this week - the World Series started Wednesday, and though it was a pretty short one, it occupied a few evenings. And while I'm not sure that Fox pushed the schedule around so that it wouldn't interfere with Glee (how is it fair or right that I don't get to see Fringe for a couple of weeks, but that thing continues uninterrupted?), it certainly seems that way. Still, good series, and my friend who roots for the Giants is probably still on cloud nine.
Stubless: Trick 'r Treat (31 October 2010, about 6:30pm)
Nothing really big-time this week - one movie I didn't really feel like talking about, one I wanted to talk about a lot, and one I went to in part because I figured few in the mainstream American blogosphere would be covering it (laugh all you want, but Endhiran drove people to this blog like crazy, relatively speaking). It's starting to get to be time to really pay attention to the multiplexes again - I really should get around to The Social Network and Hereafter while they're still playing theaters and the crush of other stuff isn't too heavy.
The one I felt talking about, Never Let Me Go, is in part because of something that gets under my skin more than it should: Nearly every write-up or review I've seen has said, more or less, to not worry about the science-fictional aspects of it, or used a euphemism like "speculative fiction", or, the one that really gets my goat, used some variation of "it transcends/is more than science fiction."
Look, I'll be the first to admit that there's a reason Sturgeon's Law was first applied to science fiction: 90% of it is crud. But, some of the other ten percent is like Never Let Me Go, fantastic. And for good science fiction to be taken seriously, it needs to stake a claim to things like this. Sure, the movie's trailer may have tried to downplay the science fictional aspects, but it was still pretty obviously a movie about clone kids created as raw materials for organ transplants (an art-house version of The Island, if you want to be sarcastic about it). Sci-fi fans should step forward and own that.
Or maybe it wasn't so obvious - before the screening, one of the trailers was for Monsters, an independent film which wears its genre trappings on its sleeve. It got a couple snickers from the audience, although it may just have been at the incongruity of one of the quotes being Ain't It Cool with "The greatest giant monster movie in years", or something like that. Still, I hear that, and I do have to wonder whether that person knows that they were settling in for science fiction themselves.
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
* * (out of four)
Seen 25 October 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run)
It's no fun reviewing Woody Allen movies any more, even on the odd occasion when it's actually rewarding to watch them. About ten years ago, with Small Time Crooks, I found myself disliking the quite pessimistic take he seemed to have on life; the end result of the movie seemed to be the universe smacking characters down for any sort of ambition. Not just the characters plotting a robbery, but any attempt to rise above one's station would be punished. And every film of his to come out in the past decade seems to conform to this, though I haven't seen Scoop or Whatever Works. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is not the film which breaks the streak.
It is, however, unusually frustrating, in that it's pretty darn inert. There's not really a story for the quality ensemble to act out, just parallel situations of temptation that ultimately leads to destruction. Random, chaotic destruction, rather than smiting directly connected to ambition, but make no mistake - happiness will only come as the result of self-delusion.
Still, there are worthwhile moments. The awkward last scene between Naomi Watts and Antonio Banderas, for instance, as she tries to act on her attraction when they both know it's too late, even though she knows it's the first moment when she feels she can, while he just won't rise to it. That's a brief moment of quiet, almost beautiful tragedy, one of the few that stands out among the uninteresting selfishness and delusion that the movie otherwise settles for.
Never Let Me Go
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 29 October 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run)
Never Let Me Go is the sort of science fiction that tends to hide its genre or go by another name - "speculative fiction" or "slipstream" - because it wants to associate itself with a different audience. Science fiction is considered to be stories about gadgets and things, while this work is about people, and relationships, and ideas. It's a false distinction, but even if one buys into it, all of the best science fiction has been about ideas, and this one is about people treated as things.
In its world, organ transplants became much safer much earlier, and cloning was apparently mastered not long after Crick and Watson discovered the double helix. Thus, by the late 1970s, Britain's National Donor Program has facilities of various types scattered around the country. Hailsham looks like a boarding school, but its charges have no parents to go home to. Three children on the cusp of adolescence are brought into focus: Tommy (Charlie Rove), a volatile but sensitive boy; Kathy (Isobel Meikle-Small), a curious young girl who finds herself attracted to him; and Ruth (Elle Purnell), her best friend. It's Tommy and Ruth who eventually pair off, though, and as they grow up and are moved to "The Cottages" to await their first "treatments", Kathy (now played by Carey Mulligan) opts to train as a "Carer". The three go their separate ways, until Kathy meets Ruth (Keira Knightley), who suggests they reunite with Tommy (Andrew Garfield) while they can.
Director Mark Romanek, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, and screenwriter Alex Garland set the story in an alternate history rather than the future, and the speculative elements are all the chillier for it. A potential future, after all, is something that we can avoid; this world is so familiar that it feels like the way that the twentieth century would have inevitably run with those key differences in medical science. The world-building is deceptively meticulous - we hear little technical jargon and few details that the audience could trip on, but the details of the clones' lives at Hailsham and after always ring true. They cheat a little, perhaps, by having characters take note of their unusual psychology, but they also sneak things in that show that the world isn't standing still, and as horrible as the idea of Hailsham is, the setting implies things that are even worse.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Trick 'r Treat
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2010 in Jay's Living Room (Halloween! blu-ray)
How, I wonder, does Trick 'r Treat not get actual theatrical distribution? It's got a couple of of notable production companies behind it (Legendary Pictures and Bryan Singer's Bad Hat Harry). It's got some reasonably recognizable faces for the trailer. The effects are slick. It markets itself as a Halloween movie, a more fun alternative to the annual Saw release. Is there really no room for a horror-comedy more interested in freak-outs than gross-outs?
That's not to say the movie is perfect, although of the four or five interconnected stories, only one - a serial killer with a really annoying kid - falls flat, and that one at least gives Dylan Baker a good, nasty-funny role. Similarly, there's a fairly notable lapse in logic to the young t(w)eens collecting pumpkins and going to a haunted quarry, but the atmosphere is more than good enough to cover it. And there's nothing wrong with Brian Cox under siege from a demonic trick-or-treater and Anna Paquin as a college girl put upon by her more experienced sister and friends.
For any faults it has, though, it's a fun ride. Writer/director Michael Dougherty is good at tingling the spine; the expectation of what may happen next is built up very well. He's also good at having the humor come from the characters as opposed to making fun of the genre. He takes his scares seriously, but populates the stories with funny people.
Stubless: Trick 'r Treat (31 October 2010, about 6:30pm)
Nothing really big-time this week - one movie I didn't really feel like talking about, one I wanted to talk about a lot, and one I went to in part because I figured few in the mainstream American blogosphere would be covering it (laugh all you want, but Endhiran drove people to this blog like crazy, relatively speaking). It's starting to get to be time to really pay attention to the multiplexes again - I really should get around to The Social Network and Hereafter while they're still playing theaters and the crush of other stuff isn't too heavy.
The one I felt talking about, Never Let Me Go, is in part because of something that gets under my skin more than it should: Nearly every write-up or review I've seen has said, more or less, to not worry about the science-fictional aspects of it, or used a euphemism like "speculative fiction", or, the one that really gets my goat, used some variation of "it transcends/is more than science fiction."
Look, I'll be the first to admit that there's a reason Sturgeon's Law was first applied to science fiction: 90% of it is crud. But, some of the other ten percent is like Never Let Me Go, fantastic. And for good science fiction to be taken seriously, it needs to stake a claim to things like this. Sure, the movie's trailer may have tried to downplay the science fictional aspects, but it was still pretty obviously a movie about clone kids created as raw materials for organ transplants (an art-house version of The Island, if you want to be sarcastic about it). Sci-fi fans should step forward and own that.
Or maybe it wasn't so obvious - before the screening, one of the trailers was for Monsters, an independent film which wears its genre trappings on its sleeve. It got a couple snickers from the audience, although it may just have been at the incongruity of one of the quotes being Ain't It Cool with "The greatest giant monster movie in years", or something like that. Still, I hear that, and I do have to wonder whether that person knows that they were settling in for science fiction themselves.
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
* * (out of four)
Seen 25 October 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run)
It's no fun reviewing Woody Allen movies any more, even on the odd occasion when it's actually rewarding to watch them. About ten years ago, with Small Time Crooks, I found myself disliking the quite pessimistic take he seemed to have on life; the end result of the movie seemed to be the universe smacking characters down for any sort of ambition. Not just the characters plotting a robbery, but any attempt to rise above one's station would be punished. And every film of his to come out in the past decade seems to conform to this, though I haven't seen Scoop or Whatever Works. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is not the film which breaks the streak.
It is, however, unusually frustrating, in that it's pretty darn inert. There's not really a story for the quality ensemble to act out, just parallel situations of temptation that ultimately leads to destruction. Random, chaotic destruction, rather than smiting directly connected to ambition, but make no mistake - happiness will only come as the result of self-delusion.
Still, there are worthwhile moments. The awkward last scene between Naomi Watts and Antonio Banderas, for instance, as she tries to act on her attraction when they both know it's too late, even though she knows it's the first moment when she feels she can, while he just won't rise to it. That's a brief moment of quiet, almost beautiful tragedy, one of the few that stands out among the uninteresting selfishness and delusion that the movie otherwise settles for.
Never Let Me Go
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 29 October 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run)
Never Let Me Go is the sort of science fiction that tends to hide its genre or go by another name - "speculative fiction" or "slipstream" - because it wants to associate itself with a different audience. Science fiction is considered to be stories about gadgets and things, while this work is about people, and relationships, and ideas. It's a false distinction, but even if one buys into it, all of the best science fiction has been about ideas, and this one is about people treated as things.
In its world, organ transplants became much safer much earlier, and cloning was apparently mastered not long after Crick and Watson discovered the double helix. Thus, by the late 1970s, Britain's National Donor Program has facilities of various types scattered around the country. Hailsham looks like a boarding school, but its charges have no parents to go home to. Three children on the cusp of adolescence are brought into focus: Tommy (Charlie Rove), a volatile but sensitive boy; Kathy (Isobel Meikle-Small), a curious young girl who finds herself attracted to him; and Ruth (Elle Purnell), her best friend. It's Tommy and Ruth who eventually pair off, though, and as they grow up and are moved to "The Cottages" to await their first "treatments", Kathy (now played by Carey Mulligan) opts to train as a "Carer". The three go their separate ways, until Kathy meets Ruth (Keira Knightley), who suggests they reunite with Tommy (Andrew Garfield) while they can.
Director Mark Romanek, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, and screenwriter Alex Garland set the story in an alternate history rather than the future, and the speculative elements are all the chillier for it. A potential future, after all, is something that we can avoid; this world is so familiar that it feels like the way that the twentieth century would have inevitably run with those key differences in medical science. The world-building is deceptively meticulous - we hear little technical jargon and few details that the audience could trip on, but the details of the clones' lives at Hailsham and after always ring true. They cheat a little, perhaps, by having characters take note of their unusual psychology, but they also sneak things in that show that the world isn't standing still, and as horrible as the idea of Hailsham is, the setting implies things that are even worse.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Trick 'r Treat
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2010 in Jay's Living Room (Halloween! blu-ray)
How, I wonder, does Trick 'r Treat not get actual theatrical distribution? It's got a couple of of notable production companies behind it (Legendary Pictures and Bryan Singer's Bad Hat Harry). It's got some reasonably recognizable faces for the trailer. The effects are slick. It markets itself as a Halloween movie, a more fun alternative to the annual Saw release. Is there really no room for a horror-comedy more interested in freak-outs than gross-outs?
That's not to say the movie is perfect, although of the four or five interconnected stories, only one - a serial killer with a really annoying kid - falls flat, and that one at least gives Dylan Baker a good, nasty-funny role. Similarly, there's a fairly notable lapse in logic to the young t(w)eens collecting pumpkins and going to a haunted quarry, but the atmosphere is more than good enough to cover it. And there's nothing wrong with Brian Cox under siege from a demonic trick-or-treater and Anna Paquin as a college girl put upon by her more experienced sister and friends.
For any faults it has, though, it's a fun ride. Writer/director Michael Dougherty is good at tingling the spine; the expectation of what may happen next is built up very well. He's also good at having the humor come from the characters as opposed to making fun of the genre. He takes his scares seriously, but populates the stories with funny people.
Monday, November 01, 2010
Aftershock, and mainstream-foreign distribution
A few weeks ago, I went to a screening of Endhiran that was packed even though it was not even the movie's opening weekend and wondered what the heck Indian films have that other foreign and independent films don't. The answer, I figure, is a combination of day-and-date releases and local marketing. It probably also doesn't hurt that they have been a staple of whatever theater they were running in at any given point over the past few years: If you've wanted to see an Indian movie in the Greater Boston area, there's been one playing.
Still, I figured Aftershock might have a chance to do pretty well. The Boston Common theater where it is playing is very close to Chinatown. The movie was a big hit in China this summer, had the look of an epic that needs to be seen on the big screen, and as it had only played there a few months ago, I figured it might not have been completely undercut by large chunks of its audience already having the movie on DVD. Heck, I saw larger-than-expected crowds at Formosa Betrayed and 71: Into the Fire, and figured it had a pretty good shot of doing well. I planned to write something about the irony that the big chain theater could open this movie up while the independent cinema a block away apparently can't.
Instead, I sat down to the 1:45pm show with only four other people, I think only one or two looking Asian. Part, I suspect, is that I was wrong about those DVDs: They apparently have some amazingly short release dates in China; though IMDB shows the movie as having been released on 22 July 2010 in both the PRC and Hong Kong, YesAsia shows 17 September 2010 releases for the DVD and Blu-ray in Hong Kong, 30 September for the DVD in China, and 15 October release for the Blu-ray in China (and the Hong Kong VCD, yes, really, VCD). So, even with an unusually aggressive American release, Aftershock was still competing with import DVDs, and Chinese DVDs are as cheap as they have to be to compete with ubiquitous piracy. (Apparently Blu-ray piracy is still lagging, as those retail for about twice as much as DVDs in China, as opposed to the 15-30% markup in the U.S.)
But I also have to wonder how well-supported the release was. Was there signage in Chinatown businesses, or ad buys on websites frequented by the target audience? I've got no idea. What I do wonder is if bigger audiences would result if AMC (or the Stuart Street Playhouse) made Chinese films a regular thing. Even if you can't get day-and-date releases, just try having something there for a couple months during a down period (September/October or February/March, maybe) or have it be a regular weekday series.
Fresh movies would likely help, but I suspect it would be hard for any local exhibitor (except maybe Austin's Tim League) to convince Asian studios to do so. After all, intuitively, the collapse of Asian films in the U.S. home video market over the past five or ten years does not seem to argue for a more aggressive, expensive courting of that market, no matter how successful Indian films have been using the same model. But I suspect Bollywood is ahead of the curve, albeit accidentally - they didn't so much anticipate a world where the internet allows fans around the world to follow foreign movie industries as closely as the local one, or where region-free DVD players allowed hardcore fans to bypass licensing agreements that don't get struck for every title (and where the ones they are struck for take forever to come out and may show up in edited form); they just saw an audience not being served and went after it in the most straightforward way possible.
Now, I suspect that it's time for everyone else to see that this is the best model - rather than waiting to strike deals with Magnolia and IFC after the buzz on your property has peaked, market directly to American fans, including day-and-date releases in theaters in or near large Chinese-American communities (this applies equally-well to Korea, Japan, heck, even France). Delays give audiences time to focus on something else, and while profits may down on the big movies, I suspect that the mid-range films will make up for it.
Also, I suspect that if foreign studios offer favorable terms to the AMCs and Landmarks of the world, there's a good chance that they'll be able to get their movies in front of audiences that might not otherwise see them. Right now, the chance of the average guy who likes movies finding these works is low - they don't show up in multiplexes, Best Buy is cutting shelving, video rental stores are imploding, Redbox doesn't stock niche, and Amazon and Netflix isn't likely to show you these movies unless you're already browsing something similar. Ironically, theatrical might be the easiest for foreign studios looking to increase their presence in the U.S. to crack, especially if they're smart about how they go about it. It will take a serious and sustained effort, though - getting the base there will require doing more than putting one movie out a month after the DVD is available.
It's also worth remembering that this will take time, because there are a few different audiences that would hopefully come in order. First, the immigrants and the hardcore fans (the guys a few notches above me) - the people who follow the Chinese film industries as closely as Hollywood if not closer. These people can potentially form a solid, predictable base if courted well (for Bollywood films, they appear to be all you need). After that, you get the adventurous movie fans - the guys who come to the multiplex and maybe will drop nine bucks on the film with a cool name and cool poster that starts in ten minutes. Having the occasional 3-D movie wouldn't hurt (and as a bonus, that's cheaper than shipping film). Then, maybe, that group will start recommending the foreign-but-mainstream movie to his or her friends, especially after he or she has seen a few that impress.
This would take time, though, and probably an unusual run of good movies. Would any theater be willing to take this chance? It seems like it could be high-risk, except for theaters with 20+ screens that are willing to take a chance on what they show on the smaller ones and places like Fresh Pond that are likely running close to the edge anyway. But with foreign film distribution falling apart in the US, it's possible that being bold is better than trying to shore up the current system.
Aftershock
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 October 2010 at AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run)
It's not hard to get the wrong impression of Aftershock; the poster in the theater lobby notes that it was released in IMAX (interestingly, though showing the North American release date, the text on that one-sheet is almost entirely Chinese), and while director Feng Xiaogang has directed a wide range of films in all genres, it has been his grand spectacles such as Assembly and The Banquet (aka Legend of the Black Scorpion) that have gotten the most attention overseas. So it may be a bit surprising when, with roughly a half hour down and nearly two to go, the film shifts gears to become a family melodrama, and stays one to the end. Fortunately, it's a pretty good one as such things go.
The film starts in Tangshan on 26 July 1976, where we meet Fang Qiang (Zhang Guoqiang) and his wife Yuan Li (Fan Xu), as well as their twin children, Fang Da and Fang Deng. Sadly, early the next morning the date and place of perhaps the most devastating earthquakes of the twentieth century: Roughly a quarter of the of this city's million inhabitants died when it struck as they slept. As the city crumbles around her, she is faced with an impossible choice - a piece of rubble rests on both her children; lift it from Da and Deng will be crushed, lift it from Deng and Da dies. Ultimately, she says "save my son". Fortunately, the men working to dig the children out are neither engineers nor doctors, and Deng lives. The silent child is adopted by two of the soldiers (Chen Daoming and Chen Jin). We next catch up with them about ten years later, when Fang Da (Chen Li), who lost an arm in the quake, is chafing at his mother's obsessive attention, while sister Wang Deng (Zhang Jingchu) is making plans to apply to medical school, though her nightmares indicate that she remembers much more about the night of the quake than she's let on.
All the characters are deeply affected by that night, and it's something we will watch them deal with practically to the present day; the English-language title turns out to be quite descriptive. This is a film not about a disaster or even just its immediate aftermath, but how a single event can affect a person profoundly. The script by Su Xiaowei spans thirty-two years and does a remarkable job of keeping the focus on its main characters even though there are ample opportunities to go off on tangents or have the main cast grow to an unwieldy size; supporting characters are rotated in and out naturally. There are some odd pacing issues, though, almost as though Feng and Su felt they had plenty of time in the beginning but pressure to wrap it up toward the end: There's a lengthy sequence with Qiang's mother and sister, for instance, that ultimately doesn't change anything, although this may be a sequence the film's main audience expects to see. At the other end of the movie, certain major emotional moments happen just off-screen. They are not bad choices; the restraint actually works very well. It's odd, though, in that there are times that restraint is not the word one would use to describe Feng's work here.
Full review at EFC.
Still, I figured Aftershock might have a chance to do pretty well. The Boston Common theater where it is playing is very close to Chinatown. The movie was a big hit in China this summer, had the look of an epic that needs to be seen on the big screen, and as it had only played there a few months ago, I figured it might not have been completely undercut by large chunks of its audience already having the movie on DVD. Heck, I saw larger-than-expected crowds at Formosa Betrayed and 71: Into the Fire, and figured it had a pretty good shot of doing well. I planned to write something about the irony that the big chain theater could open this movie up while the independent cinema a block away apparently can't.
Instead, I sat down to the 1:45pm show with only four other people, I think only one or two looking Asian. Part, I suspect, is that I was wrong about those DVDs: They apparently have some amazingly short release dates in China; though IMDB shows the movie as having been released on 22 July 2010 in both the PRC and Hong Kong, YesAsia shows 17 September 2010 releases for the DVD and Blu-ray in Hong Kong, 30 September for the DVD in China, and 15 October release for the Blu-ray in China (and the Hong Kong VCD, yes, really, VCD). So, even with an unusually aggressive American release, Aftershock was still competing with import DVDs, and Chinese DVDs are as cheap as they have to be to compete with ubiquitous piracy. (Apparently Blu-ray piracy is still lagging, as those retail for about twice as much as DVDs in China, as opposed to the 15-30% markup in the U.S.)
But I also have to wonder how well-supported the release was. Was there signage in Chinatown businesses, or ad buys on websites frequented by the target audience? I've got no idea. What I do wonder is if bigger audiences would result if AMC (or the Stuart Street Playhouse) made Chinese films a regular thing. Even if you can't get day-and-date releases, just try having something there for a couple months during a down period (September/October or February/March, maybe) or have it be a regular weekday series.
Fresh movies would likely help, but I suspect it would be hard for any local exhibitor (except maybe Austin's Tim League) to convince Asian studios to do so. After all, intuitively, the collapse of Asian films in the U.S. home video market over the past five or ten years does not seem to argue for a more aggressive, expensive courting of that market, no matter how successful Indian films have been using the same model. But I suspect Bollywood is ahead of the curve, albeit accidentally - they didn't so much anticipate a world where the internet allows fans around the world to follow foreign movie industries as closely as the local one, or where region-free DVD players allowed hardcore fans to bypass licensing agreements that don't get struck for every title (and where the ones they are struck for take forever to come out and may show up in edited form); they just saw an audience not being served and went after it in the most straightforward way possible.
Now, I suspect that it's time for everyone else to see that this is the best model - rather than waiting to strike deals with Magnolia and IFC after the buzz on your property has peaked, market directly to American fans, including day-and-date releases in theaters in or near large Chinese-American communities (this applies equally-well to Korea, Japan, heck, even France). Delays give audiences time to focus on something else, and while profits may down on the big movies, I suspect that the mid-range films will make up for it.
Also, I suspect that if foreign studios offer favorable terms to the AMCs and Landmarks of the world, there's a good chance that they'll be able to get their movies in front of audiences that might not otherwise see them. Right now, the chance of the average guy who likes movies finding these works is low - they don't show up in multiplexes, Best Buy is cutting shelving, video rental stores are imploding, Redbox doesn't stock niche, and Amazon and Netflix isn't likely to show you these movies unless you're already browsing something similar. Ironically, theatrical might be the easiest for foreign studios looking to increase their presence in the U.S. to crack, especially if they're smart about how they go about it. It will take a serious and sustained effort, though - getting the base there will require doing more than putting one movie out a month after the DVD is available.
It's also worth remembering that this will take time, because there are a few different audiences that would hopefully come in order. First, the immigrants and the hardcore fans (the guys a few notches above me) - the people who follow the Chinese film industries as closely as Hollywood if not closer. These people can potentially form a solid, predictable base if courted well (for Bollywood films, they appear to be all you need). After that, you get the adventurous movie fans - the guys who come to the multiplex and maybe will drop nine bucks on the film with a cool name and cool poster that starts in ten minutes. Having the occasional 3-D movie wouldn't hurt (and as a bonus, that's cheaper than shipping film). Then, maybe, that group will start recommending the foreign-but-mainstream movie to his or her friends, especially after he or she has seen a few that impress.
This would take time, though, and probably an unusual run of good movies. Would any theater be willing to take this chance? It seems like it could be high-risk, except for theaters with 20+ screens that are willing to take a chance on what they show on the smaller ones and places like Fresh Pond that are likely running close to the edge anyway. But with foreign film distribution falling apart in the US, it's possible that being bold is better than trying to shore up the current system.
Aftershock
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 October 2010 at AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run)
It's not hard to get the wrong impression of Aftershock; the poster in the theater lobby notes that it was released in IMAX (interestingly, though showing the North American release date, the text on that one-sheet is almost entirely Chinese), and while director Feng Xiaogang has directed a wide range of films in all genres, it has been his grand spectacles such as Assembly and The Banquet (aka Legend of the Black Scorpion) that have gotten the most attention overseas. So it may be a bit surprising when, with roughly a half hour down and nearly two to go, the film shifts gears to become a family melodrama, and stays one to the end. Fortunately, it's a pretty good one as such things go.
The film starts in Tangshan on 26 July 1976, where we meet Fang Qiang (Zhang Guoqiang) and his wife Yuan Li (Fan Xu), as well as their twin children, Fang Da and Fang Deng. Sadly, early the next morning the date and place of perhaps the most devastating earthquakes of the twentieth century: Roughly a quarter of the of this city's million inhabitants died when it struck as they slept. As the city crumbles around her, she is faced with an impossible choice - a piece of rubble rests on both her children; lift it from Da and Deng will be crushed, lift it from Deng and Da dies. Ultimately, she says "save my son". Fortunately, the men working to dig the children out are neither engineers nor doctors, and Deng lives. The silent child is adopted by two of the soldiers (Chen Daoming and Chen Jin). We next catch up with them about ten years later, when Fang Da (Chen Li), who lost an arm in the quake, is chafing at his mother's obsessive attention, while sister Wang Deng (Zhang Jingchu) is making plans to apply to medical school, though her nightmares indicate that she remembers much more about the night of the quake than she's let on.
All the characters are deeply affected by that night, and it's something we will watch them deal with practically to the present day; the English-language title turns out to be quite descriptive. This is a film not about a disaster or even just its immediate aftermath, but how a single event can affect a person profoundly. The script by Su Xiaowei spans thirty-two years and does a remarkable job of keeping the focus on its main characters even though there are ample opportunities to go off on tangents or have the main cast grow to an unwieldy size; supporting characters are rotated in and out naturally. There are some odd pacing issues, though, almost as though Feng and Su felt they had plenty of time in the beginning but pressure to wrap it up toward the end: There's a lengthy sequence with Qiang's mother and sister, for instance, that ultimately doesn't change anything, although this may be a sequence the film's main audience expects to see. At the other end of the movie, certain major emotional moments happen just off-screen. They are not bad choices; the restraint actually works very well. It's odd, though, in that there are times that restraint is not the word one would use to describe Feng's work here.
Full review at EFC.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Next Week in Tickets, Halloween Edition: Films playing Boston 29 October - 5 November
Halloween on Sunday! That means lots of spooky stuff at the smaller theaters, yet another Saw at the multiplexes, and me buying a whole bunch of Reese's Peanut Butter cups that I may or may not be around to give out when local kids come trick or treating that evening (along with comics and kid-friendly DVDs).
The point is, when I go to movies during the early part of November, I'll be bringing my own peanut butter cups to snack on. And if you know me and want some movies held back, let me know now.
The point is, when I go to movies during the early part of November, I'll be bringing my own peanut butter cups to snack on. And if you know me and want some movies held back, let me know now.
- We start, of course, with Evil Dead 2 at the Brattle, as it is what I like to call a Holiday Tradition. It plays Saturday and Sunday night as part of the Brattle's Sam Raimi: King of Cult weekend series, which also includes Drag Me to Hell and Darkman on Friday, the first two Spider-Man movies on Saturday, and, in a little Halloween change-up, matinees of his Western, The Quick and the Dead, on Sunday.
A little earlier on Sunday, they'll be running "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" as part of the Harvard Square Trick or Treat festivities, free, with candy for the kids. Tuesday night, the rescheduled CineCaché program is Four Lions, the British terrorism comedy that also happens to be the first film picked up for distribution by the Alamo Drafthouse folks. Wednesday and Thursday will feature local premieres of local movies - Left on Pearl: Women Take Over 888 Memorial Drive and Keeping the Time: The LIfe, Music, and Photographs of Milt Hinton, respectively. - The Coolidge finishes off their Wes Craven midnight series with The Serpent and the Rainbow on Friday night, and then goes for an overnighter with a Halloween Horror Movie Marathon from midnight Saturday to noon on Sunday. Of the six movies, four are being kept secret, but two of them are House (freaky and strange even for Japan) and Re-Animator. Live music, burlesque, and psychic readings will fill out the rest of the time.
In other, non-horror-related screenings, Monday night has Dirty Harry as part of "Science on Screen", with forensic scientist Amy Brodeur as a guest. Sunday to Thursday, they will be screening the complete, 5+ hour Carlos in the smaller digital rooms (a shorter version will play at the Museum of Fine Arts), and they are one of several places opening The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (see below). - Emerson has a great weekend lined up: Psycho plays Friday and Saturday, as does Make-Out with Violence, a film I loved at SXSW last year (even if I don't think I've ever quite made it through the soundtrack album I bought to support the filmmakers - it sounds much better in context!). The family-friendly film Saturday afternoon and Sunday night is Jim Henson's Labyrinth, which reminds you that Jennifer Connelly was always beautiful but the acting skill took a while to develop, but Jim Henson was always fantastic.
- The Regent Theatre's Halloween matinee is Atomic Brain Invasion, a sci-fi horror film that was shot locally and looks to be pretty family-friendly. Perhaps more interesting is Thursday night's premiere, Beneath the Blue, with a Navy officer investigating a missing dolphin and falling for a young scientist.
- The one-week warning at Kendall Square is on Kuroneko (Black Cat), a beloved Japanese horror story from 1968, presented here in a new 35mm print. Welcome to the Rileys, a movie I liked well enough at the Boston Film Festival, also opens, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest gets two screens.
- The Somerville Theatre gets right to the point: John Carpenter's original Halloween, at 9pm, on Halloween.
- There's a surprising amount of crossover between boutique houses and mainstream theaters this week. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest opens at the Coolidge, both Landmark theaters, and AMC Boston Common. Boston Common, in fact, is offering a triple feature of all three Millennium films on Friday and Saturday. At the very least, that's a chance to revisit the excellent The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on the big screen; the series loses steam as it goes, with The Girl Who Played with Fire being pretty good and the finale being a bit of a disappointment, but it starts well enough that it can fall a bit and still do okay.
Boston Common will also be opening Feng Xiaogang's disaster drama, Aftershock, which portrays the aftermath of a major 1976 earthquake just three months after its premiere in China. Feng has a pretty good track record - Big Shot's Funeral, The Banquet (aka Legend of the Black Scorpion), and Assembly - and it was a pretty huge hit there, so I'm excited to see it. Though it played in IMAX in its native land, it's not large-format here (no, they're using that screen for Paranormal Activity 2), but I gather it's more a drama than action film anyway.
Otherwise, the only mainstream film opening is Saw 3D: The Final Chapter. If you've been watching the Saw movies for the past six years, you'll probably want to see this year's model; if not, the traps are in 3-D but be warned that this is apparently not a start-from-zero franchise, but one whose story has grown more intricate with each new film. - As mentioned earlier, the shorter cut of Olivier Assayas's Carlos will play the MFA Friday evening and Saturday at noon; it's roughly half the length of the version showing at the Coolidge, running two hours and forty minutes. Starting Wednesday (3 November 2010), the MFA offers intermittent shows of Johnny Mad Dog, a French feature about African child soldiers, and Hyman Bloom: The Beauty of All Things, an hour-long look at the famed Boston Abstract Expressionist painter. Then, next Thursday (4 November 2010), the Boston Jewish Film Festival kicks off wtih My So-Called Enemy, Lisa Gossels's documentary about the difficult friendship between six Palestinian and Israeli women who meet as teens at a US program. Ms. Gossels will be there in person.
- The Harvard Film Archive resumes its Robert Gardner retrospective, with the documentarian appearing in person Friday and Saturday night. The free Tuesday and Wednesday VES screenings are James Stewart in The Naked Spur and Gene Tierney as Laura.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
This Week In Tickets: 18 October 2010 to 24 October 2010
Shortish week, but not a bad one:
Stubless: The Kovak Box (24 October 2010, Jay's Living Room, Amazon VOD)
This may very well be the first time video on demand has popped up on TWIT, which some folks may find as odd. It's not, really - given how many movies I watch, it's not always easy to fit more movies in, let alone different ways to watch movies. But, after seeing Cell 211, I wanted to see The Kovak Box.
Well, I remembered my VHS screener from 2006 (I ask for screeners every year, but am often terrible about watching them, even when my living-room technology doesn't just ignore the things). Now, folks, have any of you watched VHS recently? Now, admittedly, the last time I did, it was on a smaller television, but ye gods, how in the world did we put up with that for decades?
My VCR wasn't even hooked up anymore; I had to find an outlet and it was nuts trying to get it to stop trying to tune into cable that wasn't even hooked up. Then, about ten minutes in, it started blinking, locking up, and half-ejecting before finally just giving up. I think it more or less died of shock at being used.
The VOD looks a lot better, but getting it on the TV is kind of a hassle. I didn't drop a fair amount on my home theater to watching movies on my laptop screen, but the connections between the computer and T aren't perfect. The SlingCatcher, I've decided, is more or less worthless, but I've got a cheap DisplayPort to HDMI cable; unfortunately, it doesn't pass sound, and it took me a while to put headphones on rather than have the computer in my lap so the sound didn't seem to be coming from off to my left. I'm going to have to find a USB device to get 5.1 sound out, or maybe a headphone-to-stereo cable from monoprice.
It eventually did the job. I don't know that I'll be doing this a lot for movies versus TV, but it's nice to know, especially for smaller movies, they can be just a few bucks away.
My Dog Tulip
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 October 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)
There have been many "a boy and his dog" movies, even many that featured somewhat older boys, but I have trouble remembering many that wax so rhapsodic about the downright messy parts of pet ownership as My Dog Tulip. Via Christopher Plummer's voice and the animation of Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, we learn a great deal about the elimination habits of J.R. Ackerley's beloved Alsatian, as well as his attempts to breed her (quaintly described as "marrying" her), most likely much more than we really want to know.
Not that My Dog Tulip should be described as a "warts and all" movie. It's an enormously affectionate story of an older bachelor who finds true contentment for the first time with a dog that is large, loud, and difficult; Ackerley comes across as a true curmudgeon, as difficult in his own way as his pet. The pair don't quite make up for each other's faults, but do create a pairing that works, and earns the audience's affection.
The animation, though created entirely without paper and cels, has a pleasantly handmade feel, although occasionally the sketchy look, occasionally-sparse backgrounds, and limited animation can come across as trying a little too hard (there's having a style, and there's looking cheap). The end result is charming, but can often feel like it was more satisfying to its creators than its audience.
Predators
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 October 2010 at the Brattle Theatre (Recent [Cult!] Raves)
Even though the original Predator is not a particular favorite of mine (I didn't see it until fairly recently, and it seemed kind of unpolished compared to big action movies and hollow compared to ground-level ones), I had hopes for this one. It's got a quality ensemble cast, Robert Rodriguez is in charge and knows a little something about pulp fun, and director Nimrod Antal is coming off two movies (Vacancy and Armored) where he took a standard-issue plot and a good cast and made something better than you might expect.
Of course, when you start to expect better than you might expect, you'll occasionally be disappointed by only getting what you should have expected. That's what happens here. Basically, Antal, Rodriguez, and writers Alex Litvak & Michael Finch make more Predator. Which isn't really a bad thing; people still dig that first movie twenty-five years later, and recapturing that vibe probably counts more as success than failure. The movie is not for the folks like me who don't find the Predator's design awesome or didn't really dig the one-note testosterone fest. This one feels like it could have been a little more - the idea that the humans brought to the "game preserve" to be hunted are predators in their own right is a neat hook, as is the idea that they may find out more about these humanoids by being on their own turf - but just settles for being more Predator.
Stubless: The Kovak Box (24 October 2010, Jay's Living Room, Amazon VOD)
This may very well be the first time video on demand has popped up on TWIT, which some folks may find as odd. It's not, really - given how many movies I watch, it's not always easy to fit more movies in, let alone different ways to watch movies. But, after seeing Cell 211, I wanted to see The Kovak Box.
Well, I remembered my VHS screener from 2006 (I ask for screeners every year, but am often terrible about watching them, even when my living-room technology doesn't just ignore the things). Now, folks, have any of you watched VHS recently? Now, admittedly, the last time I did, it was on a smaller television, but ye gods, how in the world did we put up with that for decades?
My VCR wasn't even hooked up anymore; I had to find an outlet and it was nuts trying to get it to stop trying to tune into cable that wasn't even hooked up. Then, about ten minutes in, it started blinking, locking up, and half-ejecting before finally just giving up. I think it more or less died of shock at being used.
The VOD looks a lot better, but getting it on the TV is kind of a hassle. I didn't drop a fair amount on my home theater to watching movies on my laptop screen, but the connections between the computer and T aren't perfect. The SlingCatcher, I've decided, is more or less worthless, but I've got a cheap DisplayPort to HDMI cable; unfortunately, it doesn't pass sound, and it took me a while to put headphones on rather than have the computer in my lap so the sound didn't seem to be coming from off to my left. I'm going to have to find a USB device to get 5.1 sound out, or maybe a headphone-to-stereo cable from monoprice.
It eventually did the job. I don't know that I'll be doing this a lot for movies versus TV, but it's nice to know, especially for smaller movies, they can be just a few bucks away.
My Dog Tulip
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 October 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)
There have been many "a boy and his dog" movies, even many that featured somewhat older boys, but I have trouble remembering many that wax so rhapsodic about the downright messy parts of pet ownership as My Dog Tulip. Via Christopher Plummer's voice and the animation of Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, we learn a great deal about the elimination habits of J.R. Ackerley's beloved Alsatian, as well as his attempts to breed her (quaintly described as "marrying" her), most likely much more than we really want to know.
Not that My Dog Tulip should be described as a "warts and all" movie. It's an enormously affectionate story of an older bachelor who finds true contentment for the first time with a dog that is large, loud, and difficult; Ackerley comes across as a true curmudgeon, as difficult in his own way as his pet. The pair don't quite make up for each other's faults, but do create a pairing that works, and earns the audience's affection.
The animation, though created entirely without paper and cels, has a pleasantly handmade feel, although occasionally the sketchy look, occasionally-sparse backgrounds, and limited animation can come across as trying a little too hard (there's having a style, and there's looking cheap). The end result is charming, but can often feel like it was more satisfying to its creators than its audience.
Predators
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 October 2010 at the Brattle Theatre (Recent [Cult!] Raves)
Even though the original Predator is not a particular favorite of mine (I didn't see it until fairly recently, and it seemed kind of unpolished compared to big action movies and hollow compared to ground-level ones), I had hopes for this one. It's got a quality ensemble cast, Robert Rodriguez is in charge and knows a little something about pulp fun, and director Nimrod Antal is coming off two movies (Vacancy and Armored) where he took a standard-issue plot and a good cast and made something better than you might expect.
Of course, when you start to expect better than you might expect, you'll occasionally be disappointed by only getting what you should have expected. That's what happens here. Basically, Antal, Rodriguez, and writers Alex Litvak & Michael Finch make more Predator. Which isn't really a bad thing; people still dig that first movie twenty-five years later, and recapturing that vibe probably counts more as success than failure. The movie is not for the folks like me who don't find the Predator's design awesome or didn't really dig the one-note testosterone fest. This one feels like it could have been a little more - the idea that the humans brought to the "game preserve" to be hunted are predators in their own right is a neat hook, as is the idea that they may find out more about these humanoids by being on their own turf - but just settles for being more Predator.
Daniel Monzon: Cell 211 and The Kovak Box
I would have liked to see both of these movies at festivals, but it didn't quite work out. Cell 211 was showing fairly late at IFFBoston this year - they basically crammed all of their "IFFBoston After Dark" showings into just a couple time slots - and I wound up choosing The Good, the Bad, the Weird over Cell 211 and Drones because I needed some 'splosions after sitting through five subjective hours of I Am Love. The Kovak Box was a selection at Fantasia back in 2006, when I wasn't staying for the whole festival and had to rely on screeners to see the stuff on the back end.
The thing is, I didn't realize the connection until Saturday evening, after watching Cell 211. I noted during the credits that it it was co-written by Jorge Guerricaechevarria, making me think, hey, isn't that the guy with the crazy-long name who co-writes Alex de la Iglesia's stuff? Sure enough, it was, and following links on IMDB eventually got me to The Kovak Box, at which point I recalled having an unwatched screener for that somewhere. I'll discuss a bit about why I wound up watching it off Amazon's streaming service instead in TWIT, although it can more or less be summed up in three letters: V, H, and S.
Interestingly, the two films are in different languages despite having the same writers and director, Spain-based financing and production companies, and likely many crew members in common. I do believe that working in their native language helped the filmmakers a bit in Cell 211 versus The Kovak Box - there are a few moments in Box where it feels like Monzon is trying to get Timothy Hutton to approximate the way the dialog sounds in Spanish comedies, and it doesn't quite fit in English. It does serve to highlight that there seems to be a real push to make English-language genre films in Spain. They're not exactly alone in this - Luc Besson's company cranks out a fair amount of English-language action on the other side of the Pyrenees - but it does seem a bit odd. Does The Kovak Box do much better financially by having an American actor in the lead? We're talking about a movie that more or less went straight to video in the U.S., although I suppose that wasn't guaranteed; it could have turned out like Buried (which may not have set the box office on fire, but the producers likely got paid when Lionsgate acquired it). On the other hand, it could have been The Birthday, which might have been considered art-house in Spanish, rather than just weird.
Interestingly, the director of The Birthday, Eugenio Mira, has a new one making the festival circuit right now, and it (Agnosia) is in Spanish. Alex de la Iglesia's most recent collaboration with Guerricaechevarria, The Oxford Murders, was in English and wound up sitting on the shelf for a while, having a very brief theatrical run before hitting video in America. I've got it on Blu-ray, and will getting around to watching it one of these days. Iglesia also has a new movie coming out, Balada Triste de Trompeta, which (at least on IMDB) appears to be his first written without Guerricaechevarria. It's also in Spanish.
Celda 211 (Cell 211)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 23 October 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)
Director Daniel Monzon seems to know that the hook to Cell 211, with a rookie guard having to impersonate an inmate when a riot breaks out, is as improbable as it is intriguing. He and co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarria (adapting a novel by Francisco Perez Gandul) run through the set-up quickly, getting us right into its story and then following it where it leads. What takes it from a cool concept to a great movie is how "where it leads" is always both logical and surprising.
Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammann) will be starting as a guard at Zamora prison as a guard tomorrow, but he want to make a good impression, so he goes in a day early to get the lay of the land. Wardens Ernesto Almansa (Manuel Moron) and Armando Nieto (Fernando Soto) are giving him a tour when a rock thrown in the yard crashes through a decayed bit of grill-work and hits him. Ernesto and Almansa move the dazed Juan to an empty cell, but at the same time, one of the prison's most infamous inmates, "Malamadre" (Luis Tosar), overpowers another guard (Ricardo de Barreiro) and incites a riot. The guards retreat, leaving Juan behind. When he comes to, he quickly disposes of anything that would identify him as an outsider and tries to ingratiate himself with Malamadre and his lieutenants Apache (Carlos Bardem) and Releches (Luis Zahera), while his pregnant wife Elena (Marta Etura) tries to find out what's going on.
Those of us not from Spain may not quite grasp why SWAT doesn't just burst in to take care of the situation right away - it involves some of the prisoners being Basque terrorists, and them being caught in the crossfire would apparently be a political disaster. We get the gist, though, and the film uses this to not only keep the story from ending too quickly, but to raise the stakes without expanding the scope of the story too much - there will be consequences outside of the prison, but Juan, Malamadre, and company aren't going to have control taken from their hands. It also enables Monzon and company to make points about the use of force without preaching to the choir. It's a smart, clear-headed movie that trusts its audience to see and think about what's going on without diverting itself from the main story.
Full review at EFC.
The Kovak Box
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 October 2010 in Jay's Living Room (Amazon VOD)
The makers of The Kovak Box likely thought it to be a little more clever than it actually turned out, at least at some point. There are, after all, bits about characters controlling the writer in there, although director Daniel Monzon and co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarria don't go fully literal with it. Instead, they put together a decent little thriller with some nice parts, though it doesn't really start to get rolling until the end.
We start with American science fiction writer David Norton (Timothy Hutton) on a plane to Mallorca, an island off the coast of Spain, where he's to lecture at a conference. With him is his longtime girlfriend Jane (Georgia MacKenzie); back in economy class, we meet Silvia (Lucia Jimenez), a Spanish girl with a nosy middle-aged American seatmate, Kathy (Annette Badland). It's a wonderful getaway, at least until people start killing themselves. Silvia survives throwing herself out a hotel window, only to be attacked and drugged by a mysterious man (Gary Piquer). Then David's host, Frank Kovak (David Kelly) puts his cards on the table, giving him a box that connects the deaths to David's first novel.
There is, no question, a little mileage on The Kovak Box's main plot device. The movie acknowledges this, to a certain extent - the suicide circuit is presented as something that David had in his novel thirty years earlier, and that feels like about the right provenance. It's still a good horror plot that's not yet ready to be retired. Monzon and Guerricaechevarria modernize it a little, using a pop-cultural tie-in to the "Gloomy Sunday" legend and going a bit meta by having the story, in some ways, be as much about fandom and how writers often cannot escape their first or most famous works. Unfortunately, it's got a tendency to fall between its two hot spots - the satire's not as sharp as it could be, and the idea that someone could flip a switch and send a person out of their mind should come across as much creepier.
Full review at EFC.
The thing is, I didn't realize the connection until Saturday evening, after watching Cell 211. I noted during the credits that it it was co-written by Jorge Guerricaechevarria, making me think, hey, isn't that the guy with the crazy-long name who co-writes Alex de la Iglesia's stuff? Sure enough, it was, and following links on IMDB eventually got me to The Kovak Box, at which point I recalled having an unwatched screener for that somewhere. I'll discuss a bit about why I wound up watching it off Amazon's streaming service instead in TWIT, although it can more or less be summed up in three letters: V, H, and S.
Interestingly, the two films are in different languages despite having the same writers and director, Spain-based financing and production companies, and likely many crew members in common. I do believe that working in their native language helped the filmmakers a bit in Cell 211 versus The Kovak Box - there are a few moments in Box where it feels like Monzon is trying to get Timothy Hutton to approximate the way the dialog sounds in Spanish comedies, and it doesn't quite fit in English. It does serve to highlight that there seems to be a real push to make English-language genre films in Spain. They're not exactly alone in this - Luc Besson's company cranks out a fair amount of English-language action on the other side of the Pyrenees - but it does seem a bit odd. Does The Kovak Box do much better financially by having an American actor in the lead? We're talking about a movie that more or less went straight to video in the U.S., although I suppose that wasn't guaranteed; it could have turned out like Buried (which may not have set the box office on fire, but the producers likely got paid when Lionsgate acquired it). On the other hand, it could have been The Birthday, which might have been considered art-house in Spanish, rather than just weird.
Interestingly, the director of The Birthday, Eugenio Mira, has a new one making the festival circuit right now, and it (Agnosia) is in Spanish. Alex de la Iglesia's most recent collaboration with Guerricaechevarria, The Oxford Murders, was in English and wound up sitting on the shelf for a while, having a very brief theatrical run before hitting video in America. I've got it on Blu-ray, and will getting around to watching it one of these days. Iglesia also has a new movie coming out, Balada Triste de Trompeta, which (at least on IMDB) appears to be his first written without Guerricaechevarria. It's also in Spanish.
Celda 211 (Cell 211)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 23 October 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)
Director Daniel Monzon seems to know that the hook to Cell 211, with a rookie guard having to impersonate an inmate when a riot breaks out, is as improbable as it is intriguing. He and co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarria (adapting a novel by Francisco Perez Gandul) run through the set-up quickly, getting us right into its story and then following it where it leads. What takes it from a cool concept to a great movie is how "where it leads" is always both logical and surprising.
Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammann) will be starting as a guard at Zamora prison as a guard tomorrow, but he want to make a good impression, so he goes in a day early to get the lay of the land. Wardens Ernesto Almansa (Manuel Moron) and Armando Nieto (Fernando Soto) are giving him a tour when a rock thrown in the yard crashes through a decayed bit of grill-work and hits him. Ernesto and Almansa move the dazed Juan to an empty cell, but at the same time, one of the prison's most infamous inmates, "Malamadre" (Luis Tosar), overpowers another guard (Ricardo de Barreiro) and incites a riot. The guards retreat, leaving Juan behind. When he comes to, he quickly disposes of anything that would identify him as an outsider and tries to ingratiate himself with Malamadre and his lieutenants Apache (Carlos Bardem) and Releches (Luis Zahera), while his pregnant wife Elena (Marta Etura) tries to find out what's going on.
Those of us not from Spain may not quite grasp why SWAT doesn't just burst in to take care of the situation right away - it involves some of the prisoners being Basque terrorists, and them being caught in the crossfire would apparently be a political disaster. We get the gist, though, and the film uses this to not only keep the story from ending too quickly, but to raise the stakes without expanding the scope of the story too much - there will be consequences outside of the prison, but Juan, Malamadre, and company aren't going to have control taken from their hands. It also enables Monzon and company to make points about the use of force without preaching to the choir. It's a smart, clear-headed movie that trusts its audience to see and think about what's going on without diverting itself from the main story.
Full review at EFC.
The Kovak Box
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 October 2010 in Jay's Living Room (Amazon VOD)
The makers of The Kovak Box likely thought it to be a little more clever than it actually turned out, at least at some point. There are, after all, bits about characters controlling the writer in there, although director Daniel Monzon and co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarria don't go fully literal with it. Instead, they put together a decent little thriller with some nice parts, though it doesn't really start to get rolling until the end.
We start with American science fiction writer David Norton (Timothy Hutton) on a plane to Mallorca, an island off the coast of Spain, where he's to lecture at a conference. With him is his longtime girlfriend Jane (Georgia MacKenzie); back in economy class, we meet Silvia (Lucia Jimenez), a Spanish girl with a nosy middle-aged American seatmate, Kathy (Annette Badland). It's a wonderful getaway, at least until people start killing themselves. Silvia survives throwing herself out a hotel window, only to be attacked and drugged by a mysterious man (Gary Piquer). Then David's host, Frank Kovak (David Kelly) puts his cards on the table, giving him a box that connects the deaths to David's first novel.
There is, no question, a little mileage on The Kovak Box's main plot device. The movie acknowledges this, to a certain extent - the suicide circuit is presented as something that David had in his novel thirty years earlier, and that feels like about the right provenance. It's still a good horror plot that's not yet ready to be retired. Monzon and Guerricaechevarria modernize it a little, using a pop-cultural tie-in to the "Gloomy Sunday" legend and going a bit meta by having the story, in some ways, be as much about fandom and how writers often cannot escape their first or most famous works. Unfortunately, it's got a tendency to fall between its two hot spots - the satire's not as sharp as it could be, and the idea that someone could flip a switch and send a person out of their mind should come across as much creepier.
Full review at EFC.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 22 October - 28 October
This upcoming weekend may be the dullest of the year - incredibly little turnover at the boutique houses and just a couple of major openings, both of which have caveats attached.
Oh, and happy birthday to my brother Matt this Friday!
- The big openers are Hereafter and Paranormal Activity 2. Hereafteris the least excited I've been for a Clint Eastwood film in a long time; the trailers make it look like the sort of squishy spirituality that angers up my blood. I'm hoping for better - great cast, Eastwood, written by Peter Morgan - but it's hard to get enthusiastic. I do feel a little more confident about Paranormal Activity 2, although let's be clear: Anyone shelling out extra money to see a film shot to look like consumer-quality digital video in the IMAX-branded theater deserves a slap.
Occasionally, on a quiet week like this, the theaters sneak something unusual in, but there's not much of that going on. Showcase in Revere is opening a family drama, Like Dandelion Dust, that stars Mira Sorvino, Barry Pepper, Cole Hauser, and Kate Levering, has won awards at some festivals, but it's tough to tell whether its high score on IMDB is the result of genuine quality or friendly audiences. Festival crowds can be nice, especially for a film that seems as targeted to a Christian audience as this one is. - At the boutique theaters, there's even less turnover: Kendall Square swaps out last week's one-week film for a new one, Cell 211. That one, about a new guard who is mistaken for an inmate during a prison riot, looked darn good at IFFBoston this spring, and won a ton of Goyas besides. Otherwise, Kendall just simplifies screens, cutting multi-screen pics down to one and giving Never Let Me Go matinees again. The Coolidge sticks with last week's line-up, shifting some times around in the digital rooms and presenting the original Nightmare on Elm Street Friday and Saturday at midnight as part of their Wes Craven series.
- Fresh Pond offers a couple screens worth of Indian cinema, with Endhiran splitting one screen with Ram Gopal Varma's new crime story, Rakht Charitra (which appears to be the first half of a two-parter); a romantic comedy about a suicidal girl, Jhootha Hi Sahi, opens on the other. I kind of liked RGV's last one, Rann, and from the description, I'm thinking I may have to retract my incredulity at its politicians that appeared to be gangsters, as the story of Paritala Ravi and his rival Suri certainly seems equal parts politics and crime.
- Another piecemeal schedule at the Brattle: Friday and Saturday night, you can go to The Boston Bike Film Festival, a couple nights of short films about bicycling (the list of films is hidden on the site under "Venue". Saturday and Sunday afternoon, they finally get Twin Peaks out of its system, with the finale and Fire Walk With Me on tap at 8pm. At 5pm Sunday, film archivist Serge Bromberg is in town with his program Retour de Flamme, in which he presents early films with accompanying piano accompaniment. It looks nifty. Monday is the as-yet-unannounced latest entry in the CineCaché series (with Stone Heart Pizza Company selling slices). Tuesday through Thursday, they pay tribute to Tony Curtis with a double feature of two of his best, Sweet Smell of Success and Some Like It Hot
- Emerson's screening room continues to have an interesting group of films. Agrarian Utopia is a mix of documentary and narrative film from Thailand playing Friday and Saturday night, and considering that even Thai horror movies tend to look gorgeous, this should be worth looking at. The same nights, though at flipped time slots, there's a restoration of a 1964 film, Dry Summer, which also focuses on agriculture and greed. The family-friendly film on Saturday afternoon is trippy 1973 animated French film Fantastic Planet, and Sunday night there is a program of Stan Brakhage shorts.
They have some great stuff coming up for Halloween, too. - The Harvard Film Archive finishes up its Wang Bing series Friday, Sunday, and Monday; Saturday has another performance by Bruce McClure.
- It's a quiet weekend at the MFA, as well - Friday and Saturday each have a screening Pianomania and Saturday also features In Search of Beethoven as part of "Music on Film"; Friday and Saturday feature Unzipped as part of "Fashion on Film" and Tuesday has an afternoon showing of The September Issue in the same series.
- And, finally, though I mentioned it last week, Billy Joel & friends' concert film Last Play at Shea runs tonight (21 October) and Friday (22 October) at the Regent. They're also screening what looks like a found-footage-sci-fi-horror thing Saturday at 7pm, CO2, but the site says it's sold out. Thursday night is a documentary, The Eventful Life of Al Hawkes, about the Maine-based bluegrass pioneer. Filmmakers will be there to meet & greet.
Oh, and happy birthday to my brother Matt this Friday!
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
This Week In Tickets: 11 October 2010 to 17 October 2010
Ah, a weekend with no traveling, no demands other thana much-needed haircut and spending some time watching baseball, working on the pile of books (prose and graphic) that are piling up by my bedside, and seeing which fall TV shows are worth following and which aren't.
(Brief TV thoughts: FX seems dedicated to having one show on the air that I want to watch at a time; Terriers will likely give way to Justified to Rescue Me; The Event seems to want to break Lost's best-in-class standard for being needlessly convoluted by the same margin Lost came in ahead of The X-Files; Fringe still rocks; it is a minor TV miracle that someone got Fox to pay for a full season of The Good Guys, though how its genuinely inspired lunacy gets ignored while people go nuts for Glee's idiocy vexes me.)
(Brief comic thoughts: Wait, 2011 won't have a new Darwyn Cooke Parker adaptation? The Outfit ended with a "Parker will return in 2012" tease, and that's too long. However, if you want good crime comics in the meantime, A Sickness in the Family, the new Vertigo Crime entry, is the best yet in a very good line.)
Funny-ish story on that Red ticket; I arrived in time for the 3:40 show, but since Regal Fenway helpfully shows which screen a given film is playing on at a given time, I looked up, saw that the show a half hour later was playing on the second-to-last screen, and presumed that meant it was playing on one of the two "screen monsters", as they cutely describe screens 12 and 13. But, when I buy the ticket, it says 11 on it. Apparently 13 is temporarily undergoing renovation to open as an "RPX" (Regal Premium Experience) screen, which I presume will be roughly comparable to the IMAX-branded screen at Boston Common. I'm not sure whether there will be just one or if they'll start work on screen 12 once 13 is finished, or whether they'll try to slap a surcharge on it for non-3-D films (it's not like RPX is the sort of brand name IMAX is). In the meantime, they're down a screen, so check showtimes carefully.
Speaking of AMC Boston Common.. I'm not a big fan of people using their mobile devices during movies, but you know what might be a cool idea? Registering a Twitter ID for each theater and sticking it in your pre-show ad package, so that customers can send feedback directly to management in real time. I mean, once the movie starts, I'm generally not going to leave, but I might walk over to the entryway where I can still see the movie without disturbing others in the audience when I send the theater a message to turn down the bloody house lights in auditorium 3 because they're really working against the movie whose hook is that the guy is buried in near-total darkness!!
Although, granted, I might not put it quite like that. That's longer than 140 characters, after all.
Media That Matters: Short Documentaries
Seen 11 October 2010 at the Brattle Theatre (CineCaché/The DocYard Presents)
This was a pretty good collection of documentary shorts. Rather than star-rate them individually or as a group, I'm just going to rattle off some brief thoughts on each. Clicking each title will bring you to its page on Media That Matters's website, where you can watch the film, share it, and go to the various take-action links:
I'm not certain of the order beyond the first film and the last two, or that I included everything (the Brattle's site lists a few that weren't shown, and I didn't search through Arts Engine's list for any I may have missed). Most are worth seeing, and there are dozens of other free documentary shorts there as well.
Buried
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 October 2010 at AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run)
Buried is the sort of movie where every step in the process of getting made is a combination between those involved challenging themselves and crafting a movie that can be shot with a tiny budget, cast, and crew. Fortunately, this is one of the ones where the folks involve rise to the challenge, even on a set with very little headroom.
We open in darkness, not seeing Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) until he uses his Zippo lighter. He's bound and gagged, in a box roughly the size of a coffin, and while he is able to free himself from the ropes fairly quickly, he's not going anywhere. He does find a mobile phone in the box with him, along with his empty wallet, a pencil, a knife, a flask of water, and his anxiety medication. As he makes his attempts to contact the outside world, we eventually learn how he got in this situation - he's a trucker, working a contract in Iraq, and his convoy was attacked. He eventually hears from his kidnapper Jabir (Jose Luis Garcia Perez), and gets in contact with a State Department rep whose job it is to facilitate the release of hostages (Robert Paterson). But, as we all know, U.S. policy is not to negotiate with terrorists.
When the local film society has its nomination meeting early next year, I think I'm going to have fun defending my inclusion of Buried among my selections in the category of "Best Cinematography", as its hyper-constricted setting is roughly the opposite of the usual definition of great camera work; the only scenes set outside of this box appear on the telephone's minuscule screen (disclaimer: I may or may not be including the last five minutes of the movie). Cinematographer Eduard Grau has a very restricted set of angles to work with in any given shot, even though the walls and roof of the coffin are likely added digitally in some shots, but it seldom feels like we are getting unfair shots; the P.O.V. almost always seems to be inside the box. It's a legitimate marvel of close-up photography.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Red
* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 October 2010 at Regal Fenway #11 (first-run)
There are two ways to look at someone adapting one's work rather liberally. Comic legend Alan Moore insists his name be taken off it, holds a grudge, refuses the money, and gives interviews about how bankrupt the system is. Warren Ellis, on the other hand, sees that Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Mary Louise Parker, Ernest Borgnine, John Malkovich, Brian Cox, Richard Dreyfuss, and Helen Mirren have signed on to something he's written and blogs a star-struck "holy crap". Then, when he gets a look at the script, notes that it's got Helen Mirren with a sniper rifle, and says that if you don't want to see that, he doesn't even want to know you.
Red isn't terribly close to his and Cully Hammer's original work; it takes the main character and basic premise and inflates it to a broad ensemble comedy with action that is often flat-out cartoonish. And as an action comedy rather than an adaptation, it's a lot of fun; there's always an amusing new character just waiting to be introduced and the action scenes are unbelievable but just short of superhuman. They're not quite the gigantic action scenes of a summer movie, or the gritty, down-in-the-dirt fights of a grim spy flick, but a happy medium.
There is a kind of 1980s nostalgia to this, of course - American and Russian spies reminiscing about when they just fought the other side and there seemed to be rules, as opposed to today's high-tech espionage about covering up one's own nation's secrets and those of corporations. Karl Urban's villainous assassin is a family man, an everyday joe compared to the larger-than-life retirees he's hunting. You can't blame the characters for missing the cold war, nor necessarily the audience; evil empires are much easier to root against.
(Brief TV thoughts: FX seems dedicated to having one show on the air that I want to watch at a time; Terriers will likely give way to Justified to Rescue Me; The Event seems to want to break Lost's best-in-class standard for being needlessly convoluted by the same margin Lost came in ahead of The X-Files; Fringe still rocks; it is a minor TV miracle that someone got Fox to pay for a full season of The Good Guys, though how its genuinely inspired lunacy gets ignored while people go nuts for Glee's idiocy vexes me.)
(Brief comic thoughts: Wait, 2011 won't have a new Darwyn Cooke Parker adaptation? The Outfit ended with a "Parker will return in 2012" tease, and that's too long. However, if you want good crime comics in the meantime, A Sickness in the Family, the new Vertigo Crime entry, is the best yet in a very good line.)
Funny-ish story on that Red ticket; I arrived in time for the 3:40 show, but since Regal Fenway helpfully shows which screen a given film is playing on at a given time, I looked up, saw that the show a half hour later was playing on the second-to-last screen, and presumed that meant it was playing on one of the two "screen monsters", as they cutely describe screens 12 and 13. But, when I buy the ticket, it says 11 on it. Apparently 13 is temporarily undergoing renovation to open as an "RPX" (Regal Premium Experience) screen, which I presume will be roughly comparable to the IMAX-branded screen at Boston Common. I'm not sure whether there will be just one or if they'll start work on screen 12 once 13 is finished, or whether they'll try to slap a surcharge on it for non-3-D films (it's not like RPX is the sort of brand name IMAX is). In the meantime, they're down a screen, so check showtimes carefully.
Speaking of AMC Boston Common.. I'm not a big fan of people using their mobile devices during movies, but you know what might be a cool idea? Registering a Twitter ID for each theater and sticking it in your pre-show ad package, so that customers can send feedback directly to management in real time. I mean, once the movie starts, I'm generally not going to leave, but I might walk over to the entryway where I can still see the movie without disturbing others in the audience when I send the theater a message to turn down the bloody house lights in auditorium 3 because they're really working against the movie whose hook is that the guy is buried in near-total darkness!!
Although, granted, I might not put it quite like that. That's longer than 140 characters, after all.
Media That Matters: Short Documentaries
Seen 11 October 2010 at the Brattle Theatre (CineCaché/The DocYard Presents)
This was a pretty good collection of documentary shorts. Rather than star-rate them individually or as a group, I'm just going to rattle off some brief thoughts on each. Clicking each title will bring you to its page on Media That Matters's website, where you can watch the film, share it, and go to the various take-action links:
- "Lessons from a Tailor" - The film that opened the program is perhaps a little lightweight compared to the other films, but its charismatic subject - a tailor who came to America as a boy escaping the holocaust, learned his trade, bought his business, and eventually made suits for Presidents - makes it worth a look, and his quiet determination to do good is a welcome contrast to the other films' railing against evils.
- "A Girl Named Kai" - Not quite a dud of a short, but the sort that tends to leave me kind of cold - first-person, artsy, more about visually and metaphorically representing feelings than telling a story. It's not bad for that kind of movie, really, but left me feeling like I knew little about its narrator as a person or about her challenges.
- "The Next Wave" - A very interesting piece about the inhabitants of an island in the South Pacific facing an almost immediate need for relocation due to climate change. It's informative on how rising sea levels do more than just flood, although the directors could perhaps do a little better in establishing the geography in question, especially describing the place they propose to relocate to.
- "Perversion of Justice" - The site suggests that this is a condensed version of a 30-minute film, and I suspect that it works better at that length. Here, director Melissa Mummert states her point about how mandatory sentences for those involved in drug-related crimes are counterproductive, but it does feel a bit rushed.
- "I'm Just Anneke" - This one fell a little flat for me; as much as I support its general message (that gay, transgender, and other kids with different sexual identities should be given the room and understanding to be themselves), the filmmaking felt off in a couple of ways: First, it doesn't define some of its terms like "fluid gender" very well; second, the medical treatment it shows with unblinking, unquestioning approval struck me as somewhat creepy, as it is described as holding puberty off. The message sent, especially when showing Anneke with her friends, is not one of her becoming what seems right for her, but staying in place as the rest of the kids grow up around her.
- "A Girl Like Me" - Is there anything more immediately depressing than movies like this, a simple document of how black teenagers, especially girls, feel that society makes them feel generally inferior, starting from a very young age, as black toddlers consistently choose white baby dolls over black ones? It feels like something we should be long past as a society. It's a good film, though; when teenagers turn their cameras on each other with any amount of skill, the end results are usually intriguing, and this is no exception; it's direct, honest, and well put together.
- "Denied" - A simple but damning indictment of the American health care system which demonstrates by example its (literally) fatal flaw - that there is often an enormous gap between the cost of treatment and the threshold at which sick people can get assistance in affording it. This one uses a suburban mother as an example, and is all the more tragic for how clear-eyed and straightforward both the movie and the subject are about the situation.
- "Massacre at Murambi" - A short, sharp, and supremely haunting film that brings us to the Genocide Memorial in a small Rwandan village and ruminates on what we see there. Perfectly accusatory without being strident.
- "Justice Denied: Voices from Guantánamo" - A well-constructed film commissioned by the ACLU that does an effective job of confronting the excesses and injustices perpetrated by the War on Terror by interviewing a number of people who had been detained in Guantánamo Bay. They're an interesting, diverse group of Muslims and it sort of kills me to see how my country is earning a bad reputation by how it has treated these people.
I'm not certain of the order beyond the first film and the last two, or that I included everything (the Brattle's site lists a few that weren't shown, and I didn't search through Arts Engine's list for any I may have missed). Most are worth seeing, and there are dozens of other free documentary shorts there as well.
Buried
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 October 2010 at AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run)
Buried is the sort of movie where every step in the process of getting made is a combination between those involved challenging themselves and crafting a movie that can be shot with a tiny budget, cast, and crew. Fortunately, this is one of the ones where the folks involve rise to the challenge, even on a set with very little headroom.
We open in darkness, not seeing Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) until he uses his Zippo lighter. He's bound and gagged, in a box roughly the size of a coffin, and while he is able to free himself from the ropes fairly quickly, he's not going anywhere. He does find a mobile phone in the box with him, along with his empty wallet, a pencil, a knife, a flask of water, and his anxiety medication. As he makes his attempts to contact the outside world, we eventually learn how he got in this situation - he's a trucker, working a contract in Iraq, and his convoy was attacked. He eventually hears from his kidnapper Jabir (Jose Luis Garcia Perez), and gets in contact with a State Department rep whose job it is to facilitate the release of hostages (Robert Paterson). But, as we all know, U.S. policy is not to negotiate with terrorists.
When the local film society has its nomination meeting early next year, I think I'm going to have fun defending my inclusion of Buried among my selections in the category of "Best Cinematography", as its hyper-constricted setting is roughly the opposite of the usual definition of great camera work; the only scenes set outside of this box appear on the telephone's minuscule screen (disclaimer: I may or may not be including the last five minutes of the movie). Cinematographer Eduard Grau has a very restricted set of angles to work with in any given shot, even though the walls and roof of the coffin are likely added digitally in some shots, but it seldom feels like we are getting unfair shots; the P.O.V. almost always seems to be inside the box. It's a legitimate marvel of close-up photography.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Red
* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 October 2010 at Regal Fenway #11 (first-run)
There are two ways to look at someone adapting one's work rather liberally. Comic legend Alan Moore insists his name be taken off it, holds a grudge, refuses the money, and gives interviews about how bankrupt the system is. Warren Ellis, on the other hand, sees that Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Mary Louise Parker, Ernest Borgnine, John Malkovich, Brian Cox, Richard Dreyfuss, and Helen Mirren have signed on to something he's written and blogs a star-struck "holy crap". Then, when he gets a look at the script, notes that it's got Helen Mirren with a sniper rifle, and says that if you don't want to see that, he doesn't even want to know you.
Red isn't terribly close to his and Cully Hammer's original work; it takes the main character and basic premise and inflates it to a broad ensemble comedy with action that is often flat-out cartoonish. And as an action comedy rather than an adaptation, it's a lot of fun; there's always an amusing new character just waiting to be introduced and the action scenes are unbelievable but just short of superhuman. They're not quite the gigantic action scenes of a summer movie, or the gritty, down-in-the-dirt fights of a grim spy flick, but a happy medium.
There is a kind of 1980s nostalgia to this, of course - American and Russian spies reminiscing about when they just fought the other side and there seemed to be rules, as opposed to today's high-tech espionage about covering up one's own nation's secrets and those of corporations. Karl Urban's villainous assassin is a family man, an everyday joe compared to the larger-than-life retirees he's hunting. You can't blame the characters for missing the cold war, nor necessarily the audience; evil empires are much easier to root against.
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