This Week In Tickets: 31 January 2011 to 6 February 2011

Not a great week for moviegoing; if I'd realized that the bad weather and late hours at work were going to tag-team me like this, I might have used what slots I have differently:



Certainly, it's sometimes nifty to have a theater to yourself, but Zenith is no necessarily the one you'd want to see under any circumstances. And while I don't exactly regret seeing the Chinese version of What Women Want, it's more because I want to encourage foreign movies coming to the USA (and Boston in particular) while they're still "fresh", so to speak. Fortunately, The Illusionist is good enough to make up for a fair amount of bad movie at the other end of the day.

As for The Mechanic... Well, I have reward tickets I need to use up, this one wasn't under any restrictions at Fenway, and the time fit well enough around getting a much-needed haircut and stopping at the Yawkey Way store for a new fitted cap (because, iwth all that hair gone, my head is suddenly feeling a chill). Sometimes, it's enough to be playing at the right time.

The Mechanic

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 February 2010 at Regal Fenway #1 (second-run)

The Mechanic isn't a particularly bad movie; it's just one where you might wonder why director Simon West and writers Lewis John Carlino & Richard Wenk felt the need to remake another movie. That's not because the original with Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent is some sort of untouchable classic (I wouldn't know), but because stories of hitmen with their codes of honor are such an action-movie staple that specific lineage isn't that important.

It's fairly well-done, as these things go, with a few decent action bits. West's tendencies seem to be toward more destruction rather than less; it's not enough for a car to burn when there can be a massive fireball, for instance. The bad guys are rather generic, and while that may be deliberate and a good idea with the shadowy organization, it would be nice if Tony Goldwyn's alpha villain were a littl emore memorable than just being kind of oily.

When it works, it works because of the two guys at the top. Jason Statham is the big name, and he's well-practiced in throwing a punch, looking like a cool professional, dispensing tough love, and wishing he had the humanity he's lost back. He's better than this, but there doesn't seem to be another The Bank Job coming his way. Ben Foster, though, is a guy who merits attention. The troubled loose-cannon of the pair is highly watchable, with his rage always just about to explode. When it does, the movie makes great use of it; his first "assignment" is an impressive emotional action scene, as he takes on a guy much larger than he is whom the plan had been to poison just because he really needs a fight right then.

I'm not sure I'd recommend The Mechanic, but it's the slow period of the year, and if you're looking for action, it may be your best choice.

The Illusionist

I finally went to this one Saturday night, after having tried to see it the previous Sunday, and was gratified to see how crowded it was on its second weekend, including a bunch of families. Boutique cinemas don't often have PG-rated films, so I do tend to worry about whether the audience will even be able to find it or not when one does open at Kendall Square and nowhere else.

I hope that some of the people who came to see the new one from the director of The Triplets of Belleville came away with some interest in the films of Jacques Tati; to Sylvain Chomet's credit, he pointed audiences at them pretty directly, with a clip of Mon Oncle showing up within the movie. One thing I don't get, though, is why the companies that own the rights to distribute Triplets and Tati's movies aren't on top of this: From a quick look at Amazon, Triplets is not available on Blu-ray, and of Tati's four films handled by Criterion, Mon Oncle and M. Hulot's Holiday are only available on DVD, Playtime is only available on Blu-ray, and Trafic is not available at all.

I don't get this. I figure Sony will likely have a Blu-ray of Triplets to release alongside The Illusionist, but for Criterion (or whoever currently has the rights, if not them), when is there going to be a better time to put out a boxed set of the Tati films on either DVD or Blu-ray? The guy is not going to have a higher profile than he does right now, sad to say. It's not a gigantic (re-)emergence into the mainstream, but I doubt that there will be quite so many people talking about how Tati was resurrected by Chomet and why this is such a good thing when The Illusionist comes out on video. For better or worse, movies are considered art when released to the cinemas, discussed in terms of influence and merit, but product when released on video, with the reviews then talking less about those things and more about picture quality, bonus content, and what sort of commercial success it had. Thus, I would think now is the time to have these movies available, while people are talking at least a little bit about Tati in relation to this movie.

Ah, well. Here's the review; check back after the link to EFC for a little discussion of the end.

L'illusioniste (The Illusionist)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 27 January 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run)

At first, The Illusionist looks amazingly simple and sweet - two kind people, perhaps not used to having their generosity returned, are lucky enough to find each other and create a life together. To say more may perhaps be to say too much, but I don't think it is crossing a line to say that there's not a minute of this beautifully animated movie that is not beautiful - even the sad parts. Maybe especially the sad parts.

It is 1959, and M. Tatischeff is a stage magician of some skill and a charmingly formal demeanor on-stage and off. His next booking takes him to England, but the crowd he sees there vanishes after the band they came to see plays. A drunken Scotsman likes the act, though, and brings him north to play at his pub. There, he meets Alice, the maid who cleans his room and washes his shirts, and is so surprised when he buys her a new pair of shoes that she stows away with him when he moves on to Glasgow. There, they move into a hotel filled with other performers, but it's hard for a stage magician to provide for himself and his rabbit, let alone a teenage girl whose eyes light up when she passes shop windows.

Tatischeff's name is a reference to Jacques Tati, the French writer, director, and actor who made a series of not-quite-silent films around this time period, and indeed wrote the original screenplay of The Ilusionist but never filmed it. It is not necessary to be familiar wtih Tatii's films to appreciate this one; director Sylvain Chomet's own style is just as apparent, if not more so. And yet, in the middle of the same sort of caricature as his previous film, The Triplets of Belleville, Tatischeff's ancestry is obvious; he looks like Tati and has the same combination of straight-backed dignity and befuddlement as Tati's M. Hulot, and even moves the same way. He's not Hulot, though when he inevitably finds his way into a theater showing Mon Oncle, there's a moment when previously unknown brothers seem to recognize each other. Chomet, his animators, and voice actor Jean-Claude Donda make Tatischeff a distinct character, with his own charm, quirks, and personality.

Full review at EFC.

Warning: I'm going to give my reactions to the end of the movie now. If you haven't seen it and don't want that part colored by my words, go somewhere else now.


As I state in the review, The Illusionist makes an interesting change in its second half - going from two lost souls finding each other to those same characters (and others) facing change with varying degrees of success. The ways the other performers in the hotel wind up is dark - we see one trying to hang himself until comforted by Alice's bringing him a meal, showing him that somebody cares and is thinking of him, while the site of the ventriloquist's dummy in a pawnshop window is just about the saddest thing you'll ever see.

Alice, herself, seldom seems to be troubled by this upheaval - Tatischeff works his second jobs so as not to be seen by her, reaping the tangible benefits of an indulgent father figure. Indeed, some of the people in the theater seemed to find her pretty unsympathetic, especially toward the end; when Tatischeff's final letter says "there's no such thing as magicians", he's saying that the money and things he give her don't magically appear, and she's been demanding. It might be interesting to see what she becomes after the end - has she become an independent woman, or simply found a new man to sponge off, this one a boyfriend rather than a father figure? I tend to think the former - we've seen from the beginning that she's willing to work, but who can tell? Chomet ends the film in a deliberately ambiguous manner - she's received a father's love, and now needs to learn about a man's love on her own.

Tatischeff's resolution is, in its way, even more intriguingly vague: He divests himself of everything in the end, walking out of Alice's life, selling his magician's equipment, and even setting his rabbit free in a field. It's almost cruel - as much as he may be a biter, the bunny is not really a wild animal, and there's a look to it that says "what am I supposed to do?" in its final scene. It's an odd choice, especially after he'd been so worried about whether Alice had made a rabbit stew earlier. He boards a train and heads south, presumably back to France. Whatever awaits him there, he is not going to be a magician any more - maybe he's going to find a place where he fits in and live a normal life. It's up to the audience to decide whether this is more sad or healthy (he's not going to become a homeless wreck like some other performers).

That is, I suppose, the ultimate choice for people like Tatischeff - when do you stop following your dreams and settle down? You want to say never, but is it not better to do so before it destroys you? We last see Tatischeff in a train car with a woman and her child, and though his gear is gone, he can't help but do a small trick for the kid. I suspect that what's going on here is a less didactic version of the usual coming-of-middle-age moral: That Alice is not the only one who has moved on to the next stage of life at the end; M. Tatischeff has learned that the greatest satisfaction in life is raising a family - being a traveling entertainer is a young man's game, after all, and its time he left it behind.

We don't know what Alice, M. Tatischeff, or even the rabbit will make of the rest of their days. They will probably be relatively ordinary lives, but I like to think that they will be happy, informed by an adventurous youth.

(I also like to think that Alice will be out walking in the fields one day, see the bunny, and bring it home. I'm an optimist, and don't think she's ultimately a selfish person.)

What Women Want (Chinese-style) and its weird previews

In my continuing attempt to try and analyze the success of China Lion's Chinese movie imports based on hideously small sample sizes, I'm putting What Women Want in the loss column for them: The matinee show I attended was very sparsely attended, and had a number of walk-outs. A bit surprising, as I figured Andy Lau and Gong Li were fairly popular, but that may speak to the difference of "what Americans who follow Chinese film know" and "what Chinese people actually like". Of course, the auditorium wasn't exactly stuffed with people from Chinatown, so that's perhaps a moot point.

Or maybe, even if this is being mostly marketed to a Chinese-American audience, that phrase still includes "American audience" - you know, people who saw it with Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt, and even if they like Andy Lau and Gong Li more, they've still already seen it.

I kind of like that stuff like this What Women Want exists in theory, though, because it takes a little bit of a stigma off Americans in terms of being culturally ignorant. Well, maybe it more spreads it around: While it used to be more or less accepted as a given that Americans were peculiar in not reading subtitles (or even dealing with English-language movies from outside our cultural comfort zone - why else does the Chris Rock Death at a Funeral exist), that's clearly not the case: What Women Want isn't the first American movie to be remade for a Chinese audience - I've heard that the Benny Chan version of Cellular is better than the original - and there are other localizations out there: The Indian Oldboy, the British Law & Order, about a dozen versions of Ugly Betty just among Spanish-speaking countries. For stories where the exact location isn't critical, it seems people the world over prefer seeing familiar scenery.


It did have some odd trailers attached, though - I half suspect that when a multiplex theater gets something like this in, they have no idea what to stick on the front, and put every boutique preview they've got laying around the booth on. It leads to a very odd mix:

* Made in Dangenham - this one also ran in front of If You Are the One 2, and even back then, it had already come and gone from the local boutique theaters. I'm sorry I missed it - I like Sally Hawkins, Bob Hoskins, Rosamund Pike, et al - but I don't think it's coming back.

* The Immigration Tango - A cute, sitcommy-looking indie in which a Russian girl and her Latino boyfriend do the fake-marriage thing with an American couple in order to stay in the country. Hilarity ensues. Here's hoping it works as a calling card for those involved, because this sort of "middlebrow" comedy has a tough time competing with similar things that have Hollywood production values. And are the people seeing this the same people looking forward to...

* I Want Your Money - What looks like a by-and-for-Tea-Partiers flick that expresses dissatisfaction with the Obama administration in documentary form. Not that I've got any problem with that - I've certainly sat through polemics from the other side of the aisle - but a couple of things about this preview struck me weird. First, it calls itself "controversial", and I don't know that that's exactly an adjective you can bestow upon yourself. Honestly, this thing's probably too below-the-radar to be called that until after its release. Second, if you're going to build a movie on attacking President Obama for government spending, I'm not sure President Reagan is the counterpoint you want. Sure, he talks a good game in the clips, but huge budget deficits and a skyrocketing national debt is an undeniable part of his legacy.

* The Grace Card, I suspect, will also appeal to the same audience; it's a drama about faith and redemption with an overtly religious angle. There's an audience for it, and people with faith are probably underrepresented on screen, but it certainly looks kind of simplistic. Also, the only name used to sell the movie is Louis Gossett Junior, but he looks like a "special appearance" supporting actor, both from minimal screen time and his position in the credit block at the end.


Speaking of previews, I'm kind of surprised China Lion isn't attaching one for Mr. and Mrs. Incredible, which can't be more than a few weeks away. After a couple of mediocre romantic comedies, it's about time for a movie where people hit each other.


Wo Zhi Nv Ren Xin (What Women Want)

* * (out of four)
Seen 27 January 2010 at AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run)

It's bad enough that What Women Want is a romantic comedy that has deficiencies were both halves of the term are concerned, relying on its stars' charm to get the audience to ignore writing that is sloppy and occasionally desperate. Bad romantic comedies happen everywhere, all the time. What's almost worse is that there are moments when it briefly teases the audience with what might be an interesting idea, suggesting that there might have been some merit in remaking and localizing this particular story for contemporary China.

Sun Zigang (Andy Lau) is an advertising man at the top of his game, a seeming shoo-in for the new Executive Creative Director position at his agency. However, they opt to recruit outside talent, Li Yilong (Gong Li), whom Zigang naturally hits on before discovering that she's his new boss. A bizarre string of events results in Zigang electrocuting himself, and when he wakes up in the hospital, he can hear the thoughts of the women around him. At first this seems like a curse, but it soon proves useful - though he could probably pick a young girl like Yanni (Li Yuan) up without any trouble, he's also able to steal Yilong's ideas and impress their boss (Chengru Li).

Not having seen the original American film, I'm not sure which details come from that and which director Chen Daming came up with when adapting the screenplay. While much of the movie feels like random subplots strewn randomly about, there's the occasional sense that Chen had a little more than slapstick on his mind. There are scenes where Zigang and CEO Dong sit in the latter's office, smoking cigars and defining a very masculine space that excludes Yilong, and tensions both at having a woman for a boss and at what that represents (women being more independent, with economic power of their own), but Chen ultimately skates around it.

Full review at EFC.

One last comment: It's okay to have a lightning strike at the start of a movie to create a tricky situation. Having one at the end to fix everything up is lazy.

Zenith

Man, the new commute is just the gift that keeps on giving - not only has it made getting to work an iffy thing and nasty on the days it does happen, but it made it all too easy and tempting to see Zenith. The Regent Theatre was pretty far out of my way when the office was in Waltham, but with it now being in Burlington, the 350 bus takes me right past Arlington Center, so I actually figured to take it in on opening night. I was feeling lousy, though, so I put it off until Monday, and almost missed it then; something about the new place just seems to keep me there longer, so I wound up leaving just in time to reach the theater for the 7:30pm show.

It wound up just being me, which is always dispiriting, and I'm guessing that it was quiet over the weekend, because there was just the one guy working the theater when I arrived at around quarter past. He not only seemed surprised to see me, but had to turn on the lights at the snack bar to sell me a box of Dots and a Sierra Mist before heading to the balcony to fiddle with the Blu-ray player and projector (it's always somewhat amusing to see the menus flickering on the big screen - nobody is ever just able to push the right button once and have the properly preset picture appear).

It's tempting to do something screwy in this situation - live-tweet the movie's awfulness, walk out, the like - but I didn't, and not just because my phone was kind of low on juice. It's just a bad habit to get into. You do it when you're alone in the theater, and they you think it's OK when there's only a few people in the place and you're in the back row. Then when only a few people are behind you. It's not long before you're a complete jackass and Chris Parry is throwing pennies at your head.

There's probably a valuable lesson here in that when a movie only plays in a theater whose bread and butter is tribute bands, it's probably been bypassed for more mainstream distribution for a reason. The flip side, though, is that it seems terribly unfair that something like Zenith plays theaters but other zero-budget science fiction films like Cryptic don't even seem to get that.

(Oh, come on... I just checked the Amazon page for Cryptic. How hard is it to spell Seaver? Unbelievable; a place actually uses my name instead of just eFilmCritic.com and it's "Jay Sever"!)

Zenith

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 January 2010 at The Regent Theatre (special engagement)

Zenith is a bad no-budget science fiction movie, but at least it's considerate enough to place itself toward the end of the alphabet. After all, while it did somehow manage to get itself booked in a few theaters in advance of its video-on-demand premiere, it will mostly be lurking on long menus displayed by cable boxes and computers, and this positioning means that potential viewers probably will never get to it at all, and if they work their way through all the other options listed before "Zenith" - well, what the heck, they may as well watch it. By that point, they've probably seen worse.

In 2044, people are genetically engineered to be happy all the time, but that didn't work out as well as planned; instead, folks are mostly numb. Jack (Peter Scanavino), a medical school dropout, roots through old buildings to find expired drugs whose side effects of massive pain are highly prized, testing on himself. He's got a mute sidekick, Nimble (Al Nazemian), who's good with a gun, and soon meets Lisa (Ana Asensio), who surprises him by using the sort of emotionally-charged words he recites into a mirror just to remind himself they exist. One day, he comes across a suitcase with videotapes of his father Ed (Jason Robards III), and gets sucked into investigating the bizarre conspiracy theories that the unhinged man rants about - but even though the tapes are thirty-odd years old, it seems he's getting into something dangerous.

Thirty-odd years in our past, Zenith might have seemed like something exciting or thought-provoking, maybe even praiseworthy. Today, though, it just feels old-hat and actually rather lazy. The conspiracy theory lacks a particular hook to distinguish it from the dozens we've seen before. The world of the future is of the hand-me-down variety, where the filmmakers try to make a "gritty", "realistic" tomorrow out of disheveled clothes and run-down locations; it would work better if it implies a more specific string of events than just general decay. The last-act twists are surprising but not shocking because even if they were things the audience hadn't seen many times before, they don't undercut anything that the audience has really taken to heart. It's a movie made out of the same elements two generations of previous independent filmmakers have used to do sci-fi on the cheap, without any new additions or clever combinations.

Full review at EFC.

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

I'm writing this unusually early this week (and grumbling about Stuart Street and Aap Ka Manoranjan taking forever to put their showtimes online), because... Well, the alternatives are watching my work queries update without nodding off or reviewing Zenith. I can only speak for myself, but I strongly suspect paid critics don't enjoy writing negative reviews any more than I do. Sure, you get to use fun words, but crapping on something a whole bunch of people worked on for months (if not years) is no fun, and I think most people would rather try to spend their time recommending something great than warning people away from something bad.

Besides, it's not like people seemed to need warning away from Zenith; I was the only guy there on Monday. Still, it doesn't appear that the humdrum-looking stuff that comes out this week will have the sort of obscure booking that movie had.

• The major openings at the multiplex this week are Sanctum and The Roommate. Both are aiming to be thrillers of a sort, with what are pretty nondescript casts: The Roommate takes young ladies from a variety of youth-oriented TV shows and puts them into a story that sounds an awful lot like Single White Female, only in college. Honestly, filmmakers, that's lazy - trust me, there are many, many roommate-from-hell plots to use without cribbing from the most famous, and that's just from real life. Sanctum puts together some vaguely-familiar English and Australian character actors, but the star appears to be producer James Cameron's 3D cameras. Which I'm fine with. There are a couple theaters showing it from non-stereoscopic film, but, honestly, why? That's not what this movie is for. For those looking for premium eye candy, it opens on the RPX screen at Fenway and the digital-IMAX screen at Boston Common, but not the genuine-IMAX screens at the furniture stores, where Tron: Legacy appears to be hanging around another couple of weeks.



• The movies opening at Kendall Square are more interesting: Barney's Version is Oscar-nominated for Best Makeup, presumably for aging its cast over a long period of time. That's its only nomination, but it looks like an enjoyable-enough story with a cast that includes Paul Giamatti, Dustin Hoffman, Minnie Driver, and Rosamund Pike. It's mainstream enough to also open at Boston Common (Biutiful also expands there). The one-week warning is for Undertow, a Peruvian ghost story with a rather nifty conceit - a married man in a very traditional town is literally haunted by his love for another man. It played well at festivals and is up for both Best Movie and best Cinematography in the Chlotrudis Awards (so if you're voting for those, you've got seven days to see one of the contenders).



• Another thing likely penciled in for just a single week is the Chinese remake of What Women Want, which opens at Boston Common the same day as its 3 February opening in mainland China (actually two weeks before it opens in Hong Kong). If you remember the Mel Gibson/Helen Hunt flick from a few years ago - reprobate gains the ability to hear women's thoughts, uses for his own advantage, eventually becomes better person - it looks like it's basically the same, except with Andy Lau and Gong Li and with everybody speaking Mandarin.



• Something made much closer to home is running for a week at Showcase Cinemas in Revere. The press release I received says the one-week run of Oxy-Morons is a preview, but that's no guarantee it will ever show up anywhere else. It's tough to get a read on; it's listed as a suspense film, the press seems to push it as a sincere drama about the epidemic of Oxycontin addiction made by people with first-hand experience, but the title, let us say, doesn't give the same vibe.



• The Brattle has a relatively straight-forward schedule this week: William S. Burroughs: A Man Within opens Friday and plays through Thursday. Director Yony Leyser's film is a documentary about the famed Beat author, digging up rare footage of the man as well as focusing on his influence as an artist. It's narrated by Peter Weller, who also stars in Naked Lunch, David Cronenberg's adaptation of one of Burroughs's famous novel. It plays single shows at 9:15pm on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.



• At the Coolidge, the Sundance Shorts finish their run, Inside Job moves to the tiny screen, and On the Bowery takes up residence in the screening room. It's a partially-scripted documentary from 1957 that shows three days in the life of New York's skid row, apparently a revolution in its time and said to hold up. It's short (just over an hour), so the Coolidge is also showing a 45-minute "making-of" featurette after each show.
  
  The King's Speech and Black Swan continue to own the two main screens, but they do give way to others for midnights Friday and Saturday: Pink Flamingoes plays both nights, and since it's the first weekend of the month, The Room pops up on Saturday. If you want something completely different, they're also showing The Muppet Movie Sunday morning at 10:30am as part of their kids' film series, but unaccompanied adults are also welcome.



• Emerson has the other great show for kids, a 35mm print of A Boy Named Charlie Brown that plays Saturday at 2pm. Peanuts was already nearly 20 years old when this feature came out in 1969, would continue for another 30 years, and remains fantastic to this day.
  
  Unusually, Emerson carries the same programming through the entire weekend otherwise - Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings all see it playing Man of Aran, director Robert Flaherty's 1934 depiction of life on Ireland's barren Aran Islands. Like On the Bowery, this is also supplanted with a making-of feature, George Stoney's How the Myth Was Made, which revisits Aran forty-five years later. It also ties in with some of Emerson's Irish Festival programming, as The Cripple of Inishmaan on the Paramount Ceneter's main stage takes place around the shooting of Aran.



• The Museum of Fine Arts begin a "Films and the City" series (as noted last week); this week spotlights San Francisco with Hitchcock's Vertigo and New York City with Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and a package of three short films by Rudy Burckhardt.



• The Harvard Film Archive concludes their Hong Sang-soo series, "Play It As It Lays". Director Hong will be on-hand Friday night for Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors and Saturday night for his most recent, Oki's Movie. After that, he presumably returns home to Korea, but the Archive will play On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate on Sunday and Night and Day on Monday.
  
  The VES screenings are not part of the official HFA program, so there's little information available, but might be interesting for those looking to increase their film knowledge. Tuesday is a program of experimental shorts by Stan Brakhage and others; Wednesday is the controversial but massively influential Birth of a Nation.



• I missed the double feature at the Arlington Capitol last week, which is too bad, since it was two by Kurosawa. This weekend, it's two by François Truffaut - The 400 Blows and Jules et Jim. They're playing in high definition and run Friday to Sunday (4 - 6 February). Their sister theater in Somerville, meanwhile, goes big starting on Wednesday, when 35mm prints of GoodFellas and Casino play back to back on their main screen.
  
  Not affiliated but also in Arlington, the Regent Theatre has IFFBoston/Fantasia alum Lemmy for one night - Friday 4 February at 8pm. I didn't see it at either, but folks seemed really excited going into this documentary on the Motorhead frontman.



• Another thing I forgot to mention last week (and didn't realize until arriving at the theater) is that while the Somerville Theatre is playing two films which are already out on video (The Social Network and The Kids Are All Right), one ticket gets you into both. This week, in second-run but not double-feature news, they pick Rabbit Hole up as it leaves Kendall Square. Sofia Coppola's Somewhere also leaves Cambridge and winds up at the Capitol, where it will play as part of a double-feature with The Social Network. Finally, Stuart Street moves The Social Network down to a half-theater, with The Way Back taking the early-evening slot (except on Wednesday, when a live show uses the theater).

My plans look to be along the lines of Sanctum Friday night, What Women Want Saturday (because I'm still getting a bunch of hits for If You Are the One 2, and I will ride that "only guy reviewing these movies in English" train), and maybe heading out to see Oxy-Morons on Sunday because, hey, local and that theater out in Revere is still playing Tangled in 3-D. Maybe Nuremberg and The Illusionist, the casualties of Sunday's projector problem as I rearranged stuff. I've also got to make use of some reward-program tickets before they expire, which seems like an ideal way to see Blue Valentine and/or The Mechanic.

This Week In Tickets: 24 January 2011 to 30 January 2011

This was the first week at the day job's new location, and I can't say I like the new commute. Before, the 70A bus stopped just outside my house, picked me up, and then dropped me off in front of the office's parking structure. It took forty-five minutes or so and only ran every half hour, but was easy to handle. The new one involves walking to Central Square, taking the Red Line to Alewife, and hoping I made it in time for the 8:15 bus which takes an hour to get to the end of the evocatively named Corporate Drive in Burlington, which isn't much fun to walk in the winter.

End result: Not nearly as much stuff seen during the week - in fact, I opted to work from home on Thursday, ostensibly because of the storm, but more because I was pretty sure that getting to Coolidge Corner by 7pm would otherwise be impossible:



Stubless: The Social Network, 30 January 2011, 7:15pm, Somerville Theatre #1

I had plans for Friday and Saturday, but I think Monday's discovery that the 8:50am bus only goes as far as the Burlington Mall (2.2 miles of unshoveled sidewalks and disorienting streets from work) finally caught up with me - I just wanted to drop by mid-afternoon, and even if Saturday wasn't the day Red Sox tickets went on sale online, I just wasn't moving far from bed that day.

Sunday was another screwy day, but one that showed how well-run some of the local theaters are. I made it to Kendall Square just in time to see the 11:35am show of The Illusionist, and fifteen minutes later they announced that power wasn't getting to the projector's lamp. They issued refunds and make-up tickets in an courteous and professional fashion, which hopefully created a good first impression for the families that might not otherwise go there. I'll be checking that out later this week.

It left me finished with my grocery shopping a little early, so I headed up to Davis Square to catch up on stuff I'd missed earlier in the year, Inside Job and The Kids Are All Right. It wasn't until I had my ticket for Kids that I saw it was actually a double feature with The Social Network on the main screen, so even though I'd been planning on going home after two... Free movie I've been putting off! And when they say double feature, they mean it - there was something like a five-minute turnaround between the two films, barely enough time to head to the concession stand for a snack, if you were so inclined.

All three movies were pretty good, although I was certainly reminded that, for all their great prices on tickets and snacks, often creative programming, and fine projection, certain parts of certain auditoria there are, shall we say, snug. The main theater, I get being designed for small nineteenth century people (see also: Fenway Park), but I can see my taller brothers not liking where I was sitting in screen #2 at all!

Inside Job

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 January 2010 at The Somerville Theatre #2 (second-run)

Documentaries covering current affairs are often angry things, and while that's as it should be, it often hurts them a bit. Anger's a great motivator, but it often means that the bastards you're interviewing can see you coming, and the audience you most want - and need - to reach will maybe dismiss you out of hand. Most of these documentaries amount to preaching to the converted, even if they don't intend to; the filmmaker's anger gets away from him or her.

Charles Ferguson, on the other hand, has a leash on his. There's no question that he holds many of the subjects of his film in disdain at best - and it is in fact rather satisfying toward the end when he prods an interviewee into losing his cool - but he's too focused on his message to get sidetracked. His portrayals of the people who failed in their responsibilities to safeguard America's economy doesn't split on party lines; every administration from President Reagan's to President Obama's is held at fault. And he doesn't get hysterical - the film is a calm recitation of how the economic crisis of 2008 developed, condensing complicated issues and economic theories into ideas that are readily understandable, with sources cited for those who would like more details.

It's not a perfect documentary or film; although the film openly acknowledges the hypocrisy of it, it does use Elliot Spitzer as an expert witness after making a point of the bad behavior of Wall Street traders. What appears to be the weakest link in the chain of misconduct - the companies which assigned favorable credit ratings to bad stocks - do not seem to be probed very hard. And as fascinating and important as the material is, the segment about how the study of economics in academia has become tainted comes off feeling a bit like a tangent.

Despite that, it's still a well-constructed, informational piece of work, one that I suspect could lead to useful conversations with political opposites, as opposed to simply talking past each other.

The Kids Are All Right

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 January 2010 at The Somerville Theatre #1 (second-run; Oscar double-feature)

The Kids Are All Right is a cluttered movie, in a way that studio pictures have a hard time approximating. In a studio picture, I suspect that there would be an attempt to make at least one of the characters' living spaces neat and precise, with a clear meaning to every color and corner. Every subplot would wrap up neatly, or there would be an obvious rationale for why it didn't.

Director Lisa Cholodenko, on the other hand, doesn't do that; as much as anything else, the film's apparently lived-and-worked-in locations give the film a sort of immediate realism that it maybe doesn't have immediately. The characters are, after all, a bit broad, and sometimes it seems like Cholodenko is trying to guide the audience a little too much - we're repeatedly told that the kids and their moms find their sperm donor a bit full of himself, but Mark Ruffalo maybe isn't quite making that impression on the audience. Plus, hey, did you notice that Annette Bening's Nic drinks?

Still, for all the film's weaknesses, it does contain a pretty fantastic performance by Bening - not necessarily subtle at any given point, but shifting between states very smoothly. Among a very nice cast, many of them often doing flashier things, she is almost always the one most worth watching.

The Social Network

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 January 2010 at The Somerville Theatre #1 (second-run; Oscar double-feature)

Watching the first few minutes of The Social Network made me wonder what sort of drugs Aaron Sorkin was back on, and whether acting out one of this scripts required being on the same ones. Jesse Eisenberg is playing about the most Aaron Sorkin-y role imaginable - talking fast, diving headlong into work like there's nothng more interesting, jumping back and forth in conversations like he's out of sync with the rest of the world. It's one almost entirely without warmth, though - as written by Sorkin and played by Eisenberg, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is almost a monster. He's capricious and cruel, and it's not like he's unable to feel human emotion at all - he's consumed with envy and jealousy. His personal frailties don't make him close to likable, but certainly interesting.

It's not just Eisenberg's and Sorkin's film, of course - David Fincher and a great cast take the script and make it move; although there's the occasional hitch in jumping between the events as they unfold and the depositions as former partners sue Zuckerberg, the story moves at a good pace. What's perhaps most interesting to me is that there's never the feeling of being on the traditional introduction/development/climax/resolution curve until the very end; it feels like pure forward momentum; even the turning points don't feel like big ones except in retrospect.

I also love the entire cast. Eisenberg's got the most notable performance, playing the outwardly strange guy, but Andrew Garfield is pretty terrific as his friend and initial business partner, doing an interesting thing by making the "suit" the most likable, friendly guy in the movie. Similarly, Armie Hammer plays the twin privileged, smarmy jackasses with such sincerity that they become people almost worth rooting for, even though it's clear exactly what role they play in the story. It's a more honest, oddly idealistic arrogance than that Justin Timberlake brings to his role, although both are funny and hugely entertaining.


With these three movies polished off in one afternoon, I've seen pretty much all of the major nominees for the Oscars - I'm missing Javier Bardem in Biutiful (and I'm good with that), Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine, and The Illusionist for Best Animated Feature. I think I'm pretty much done after The Illuisonist and maybe Blue Valentine, then - I'll see the shorts when they play Kendall and the Coolidge starting the 11th, and I don't care how many technical awards Alice in Wonderland is nominated for, that does not count as a gun to my head. (Harry Potter is nominated for a bunch, too, but I figure that it will play one show a day at the Capitol until the last movie comes out)

Maybe I'll do an Oscar column at some point - we don't seem to have one on eFilmCritic - but right now, I just want to eat, sleep, and hope that the snow's not nuts again tomorrow.

Sundance USA: My Idiot Brother

Wow, are my pictures from this horrific. I'm not even going to consider subjecting you to the reddish blobs my camera took of director Jesse Peretz.

The Sundance USA program - where movies from the current Sundance Film Festival screen at different venues around the country while the festival is still going on - is a nifty idea, and as close to the Park City as many of us are ever going to get. (What, you think I'm going to take a vacation in the middle of January to go someplace that's even colder and snowier than New England? There are, in fact, limits to how much I love film.) Sundance is a big and cool thing, but has grown rather distant over time; Austin's SXSW film festival, for instance, got the reputation of being just as viable a place to premiere films without seeming as snobby or industry-focused. That's a reputation that Sundance probably doesn't deserve - in addition to the festival, the Sundance Institute has a number of filmmaker-focused programs - but when more of the news coming out of Utah is about sales and celebrity sightings than whether something is a good movie, it's easy to get the wrong imipression.

So they reach out to the country at large, showing us that they are really all about promoting independent film - as much as there's a lot of business-oriented stuff going on, their mission is still, mainly, to give independent filmmakers a chance for their works to be seen. It's probably no coincidence that at least some of the pictures chosen, like My Idiot Brother, are much more mainstream than avant-garde. This is a fun movie, and for the people who were there Thursday night, their first-hand encounter with Sundance is now something enjoyable and not pretentious at all.

My Idiot Brother

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 January 2010 at The Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Sundance USA)

My Idiot Brother is just as broad a comedy as its name suggests but a good deal less mean-spirited. In other eras, it might have been a door-slamming farce, although in the present its screwball tendencies are held back just a little; well-rounded characters are valued a bit more now.

Title character Ned (Paul Rudd) is, indeed, not very bright - he gets sent to jail not just for selling pot to a police officer, but to a uniformed one - but there's not a mean bone in his body. The same is not true for girlfriend Janet (Kathryn Hahn), who has found a new boyfriend (T.J. Miller) and kicks him off the farm, not even letting him take Willie Nelson, despite Willie obviously being Ned's dog. So he winds up back home with his mother (Shirley Knight), but soon winds up couch-surfing and picking up odd jobs with his three sisters. Housewife Liz (Emily Mortimer) gets him a job helping her husband (Steve Coogan) shoot a documentary, but they don't really approve of him roughhousing with their son River (Matthew Mindler). Writer Miranda (Elizabeth Banks) has him drive her around while doing a story on Lady Arabella (Janet Montgomery), who won't tell Miranda the juicy stuff Miranda's editors want but hits it off with Ned right away. Youngest sister Natalie (Zooey Deschanel) lets him in on a secret that could wreck her relationship with Cindy (Rashida Jones), who's helping him get Willie back. And while Ned would never do anything to hurt his family, he tends to take what people say at face value, so inevitably things are going to slip out.

Ned is stunned to find out that River has never seen The Pink Panther early on, and it's not surprising that director Jesse Peretz and writers Evgenia Peretz (his sister) & David Schisgall (her husband) would refer to that movie. After all, Ned's not so distant a relative from Clouseau, a well-meaning force of comedic chaos who wanders from one situation to another, frustrating people terribly even though he is seldom actually the cause of their problems. From the first moment that the trusting Ned sees something with a chance of causing trouble, Peretz does a fine job of both keeping a number of balls in the air and dropping them when it seems appropriate; it's a fun blend of both comedy and comic anticipation.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 28 January 2011 - 3 February 2011

Oscar nominations got announced Tuesday. This year, I'm reasonably caught up, with only one glaring oversight (that's right, despite my love of Fincher and Sorkin, I still haven't seen The Social Network). I'll correct that, not out of any compulsion toward completion, but because it looks like a pretty good movie. I used to think you had to see everything to have a right to have an opinion about what is snubbed and what isn't on the night of the awards, but while this might be true, suffering through Chicago a few years ago disabused me of the notion that this was in any way worth it.

• If you do want to catch up, the Somerville Theatre in particular has your back. They're already showing The Social Network and Best Costume nominee The Tempest, and this week they re-open Best Documentary nominee Inside Job and multiple nominee The Kids are All Right. Inside Job also re-opens in the Coolidge's screening room. And The Social Network, already playing at Somerville, Stuart Street, and the Arlington Capitol, re-returns to AMC Harvard Square. If you'll recall, it re-opened there two weeks ago, played a week, and is now back again. Three and a half screens for something that's out on video, and we don't get Ip Man 2, despite that opening in spots around the country today.



• Oscar nominees also tell the tale of what opens at Kendall Square. Not only does 127 Hours expand back to a full screen after limping along with just late shows for a couple weeks, but Biutiful (nominated for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor) and The Illusionist (nominated for Best Animated Feature) open. I'm a little skeptical of Biutiful - it looks like more interconnected suffering akin to director Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu's Balbel and 21 Grams, and I don't remember either fondly. But The Illusionist looks wonderful, with The Triplets of Belleville's Sylvain Chomet adapting a screenplay by Jacques Tati.
  
  The one-week warning is for Nuremberg, a newly-restored version of the 1948 documentary of the first modern war crimes trials. It's never been shown in the U.S. before this new release, and the soundtrack had to be completely reconstructed. For the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (28-30 January) shows, Sandra Schulberg (daughter of original director Stuart Schulberg and a major part of the restoration team) will be present to introduce the film and perhaps answer questions.



• Oscar likely has very little to do with the two main films opening on multiplex screens. Sure, The Rite has former Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins, but otherwise it looks like the Season of the Witch to The Last Exorcism's Black Death - bigger, more expensive, and with some more familiar faces, but just not looking quite as scary, because imaginary demons just aren't as scary as the cruelty human beings are capable of.
  
  The other major opener is The Mechanic, in which Jason Statham and Ben Foster try to step into the shoes of Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent. Off the top of my head, I'm not sure whether that's an upgrade or not. It looks like a bunch of Jason Statham doing Jason Statham things - a little martial arts, a little looking cool, a little vehicular mayhem. Generally, there's worse ways to spend a couple hours.



• One more movie opens this week for a semi-conventional run: Zenith, an indie sci-fi movie that describes itself as a retro-futuristic steampunk thriller taking place in two time periods with people genetically engineered to be happy all the time discovering that only sorrow makes life meaningful. It's potentially a game of cliche bingo, but sometimes interesting things come out of that. It's playing one show a day - 8pm tonight, 11pm Saturday, and 7:30pm Sunday through Thursday. As a head's up (in case I don't get this up early then), the Regent will be playing IFFBoston selection Lemmy next Friday (4 February).



• The Brattle continues their "(Some of) The Best of 2010" series with a few interesting double features - tonight there's a pair of zany, surprisingly good by most accounts youth comedies with Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Easy A; Saturday is a pair of films about young girls in big trouble, Winter's Bone and Fish Tank; and Thursday a pair of rediscovered Japanese horror films with new prints - Kuroneko and House. On other days, there are singles - the full five-and-a-half-hour cut of Carlos on Sunday afternoon, IFFBoston Best Doc winner Marwencol on Monday, and low-budget kaiju/romance Monsters on Wednesday.
  
  Marwencol will also be playing Sunday night as part of the Boston Society of Film Critics's annual awards ceremony, where they will honor its director, Jeff Malmberg. Tuesday night sees the return of The DocYard, a bi-weekly screening series of documentaries that will run through April. The first entry is Armadillo, Janusz Metz's chronicle of a UK-Danish base in Afghanistan.



• It's a week without a lot of change at the Coolidge - the Sundance shorts move to a smaller room to make way for Inside Job, but The King's Speech and Black Swan stay put. The schedule of special events is likewise pretty quiet - if you enjoyed Santa Sangre at the Brattle on Monday, you may want to check out Alejandro Jodorowsky's other crazy 1970s midnight movie, El Topo. Man, I thought his bandes dessinéees were screwy, but his movies make them look quite sane. Sunday morning, the Goethe-Institut presents Vincent Wants to Sea (yes, that apparently is the proper translation of the title), about a Tourettes-afflicted young man who flees the sanitarium where he lives with two friends for a road trip with his mother's ashes.



• The Harvard Film Archive is back doing what it does today, when it starts Play It As It Lies, a two-weekend retrospective of the films of Hong Sang-soo. Director Hong is not a man I'm terribly familiar with, but he is very well-regarded and will be at the archive in person next weekend. For this weekend, four of his films are on tap: The Power of Kangwon Province and Hahaha tonight; The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well on Sunday, and Tale of Cinema on Monday. If Sunday's Brattle event isn't enough Harvard Square and Boston film critics for you, they have a screening of For the Love of Movies hosted by director Gerald Peary and "followed by a panel of prominent Boston-area critics who will be discussing the state of film criticism in the era of the Internet". I was not invited (not surprising; it makes sense to go with someone who does this full-time rather than as a hobby), but am tempted to go and see if they have any pure on-line guys or if it will just be old people complaining about us. Admission is free for HFA members. VES re-starts their free screening series in February, with The Beaches of Agnes on Tuesday and a selection of early short films on Wednesday.



• Emerson programs some good stuff at the Paramount Center, especially if you like Robert Mitchum. Charles Laughton's excellent Night of The Hunter plays Friday and Saturday nights, while the original Cape Fear is the back end of Saturday's unofficial double feature before playing at 7pm Sunday. The family-friendly program Saturday afternoon is a Passport Shorts Program from the Children's Film Festival Seattle. It's 77 minutes of short films from a half-dozen or so countries, featuring "real-life kids who are making a difference."



• The MFA wraps up the Boston Festival of Films from Iran today and tomorrow, around one show per day of The Agony and Ecstasy of Phil Spector. In February, they launch a Cinema and the City series; it runs through the entire month and starts with Vertigo on Thursday afternoon.



• The ICA has a pair of short programs this weekend: Saturday at 5pm is The 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival Program One, a collection of short films from the continent's "longest-running independent and experimental film festival". Sunday afternoon (2pm and 4pm), they have a program from The Ottowa International Animation Festival, one of the most prominent animation-focused festivals in the world.

My plans? Well, crap, there's a lot going on tonight. I think I'll likely take in Zenith on my way home tonight, see how much time getting Sox tickets takes tomorrow, and then shoot for The Mechanic, Nuremberg, and The Kids Are All Right on the weekend. Probably The Illusionist, too, because the new commute is going to make getting to Kendall Square in time on a weekday iffy.

This Week In Tickets: 17 January 2011 to 23 January 2011

"2011" still looks funny up there, doesn't it? And, let me tell you, though you don't see any change here, I'm still a little thrown by the opposing page in my desk calendar/scrapbook being mid-twentieth century advertisements instead of pin-up girls.



It wound up being a slow week, in part because of weather. After what seems like a few years of "wait, why should climate change be considered a bad thing" winters in Boston, it's been really cold and snowy on a regular basis in 2011. I worked from home on Wednesday, hitting Finale and the comic shop (just as it was closing for lack of customers) at the end of the day out of pure cabin fever, and on Friday I was one of about a half-dozen to come to an office that holds considerably more than that number. It wasn't that nasty out, but people had packed for the move on Thursday in anticipation of a storm, so why come in, take stuff out of boxes, work a few hours, and then put them back in again.

Gantz is an advance ticket - I think I bought it back on the 9th, when I saw Season of the Witch - and it's a good thing . Between staying at work unexpectedly long on Thursday and the buses being a bit unpredictable, I arrived at the 8pm show at something like 8:02, although there was fortunately a pre-show being beamed out from L.A., where the film's stars had flown in to introduce the screening and take questions after mere hours after doing so in Tokyo (well, with flight time, probably more than "mere" hours, but that just makes it a little more crazy, right?). Fortunately there was an open seat fairly front and center that I could get to without having to climb over people - the show was sold out, and the people who arrived after me wound up sitting on the floor rather than break their group up.

I can't quite say my experience was as frustrating as Boozie Movies from Twitch's. To be honest, his talk about moving seats makes me think he wasn't helping the environment, but I can't say I could really complain about the smell. I do think, though, that otaku used to consuming their anime in the comfort of their living room may need a bit of a reminder that, while it's okay to yell at the screen when you're getting together with your friends to watch the new DVD you've imported or torrent you've downloaded, the rest of us did not pay $12.50 to hear you. And while you may think "I paid $12.50, I can do what I want"... It really doesn't work that way.

Anyway, I find myself genuinely hoping that there will be some sort of early announcement that Fantasia or NYAFF will announce that they're playing both Gantz movies subtitled super-early, so that I can avoid even the temptation to see it with this crowd again.

Primal

It's past midnight, and although I'm not certain that I've written about a movie where a attractive young people go nuts and start trying to eat their friends before, it seems pretty likely. And if I have, anything I write about Primal is just going to be me repeating myself. So what say I call it a night and come back strong writing "This Week" and "Next Week" on the way to work and during lunch?

Primal

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 January 2010 at The Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (@fter midnight, Blu-ray)

I suspect that the script for Primal was, even more than most horror movies, dictated by resources - they could get this location for filming, a little bit of simple CGI, a reasonably straightforward make-up job for every shooting day but a few more impressive gore effects on occasion, and a director with an animation background. It feels that way, at least - like filmmaker Josh Reed saw what he could make a movie with, connected the dots as best he could, and figured that enthusiasm is more important than coherence in this sort of movie, anyway.

So we start with three pairs of kids in their twenties. Dace (Wil Traval) is an anthropology grad student driving the van to see some cave paintings that an ancestor of his girlfriend Kris (Rebekah Foord) described 120 years ago. Along for the ride are Mel (Krew Boylan) and her boyfriend Chad (Lindsay Farris), who as expected are making their tent shake within minutes of pitching it; Anja (Zoe Tuckwell-Smith), nervous and claustrophobic after an ugly incident with her old boyfriend; and Warren (Damien Freeleagus), a friend whom one suspects would rather like to be more, but recognizes that now is not the time. Aside from finding a rabbit with huge, sharp teeth, things are going swimmingly - that is, until Mel goes skinny-dipping in a nearby pond. Even though the leeches are pulled off quickly, she starts running a fever, losing teeth, and regressing to a more primitive - and violent - state.

As groups of college students about to get chewed up and spat out by ancient evils go, it's a pretty good group. Not perfect - Chad is more or less "Mel's boyfriend" and Kris is "Dace's girlfriend/Anja's friend", although to the credit of Reed, Farris, and Foord, they do manage to make themselves more than filler with which to increase the body count. The other characters are not particularly deep, granted, but they're familiar-enough figures that are likable enough - or, in the case of Wil Traval's Dace, thorough-enough pricks - to keep the audience amused before things go screwy and afterward. Special credit to Krew Boylan, who takes what is basically the bimbo of the group and makes us like her just enough that the audience doesn't slip into "that thing's not Mel anymore!" mode right away.

Full review at EFC.

The lost art of the "big indie": The Company Men and The Way Back

Back in the nineties or early aughts, both The Company Men and The Way Back probably would have been released by Miramax; they're technically independent films but have more the "mini-major" feel about them: Name directors, casts of movie stars working below their usual pay grade, platform releases designed to just catch award eligibility in L.A. and expand to the rest of the country after the holiday pictures have blown out.

Now, The Weinstein Company releases The Company Men, and I don't think that it got an Academy-qualifying run - at least, I don't see any release dates before 21 January 2011. It's a startlingly low-profile release, when you think about it: The Weinsteins have always been canny marketers, and they've been sitting on this Ben Affleck picture for a year (they acquired it at Sundance '10), and The Town has rolled back a lot of the joking people did about him. However, they didn't seem able to nail down a fall release date, and instead this hits theaters in January, without much fanfare. It got creamed at the box office, and I suspect that a good chunk of what it did get came from here in Boston (we can be pretty loyal to movies shot here with local talent, and native Affleck, transplant Chris Cooper, and Harvard grad Tommy Lee Jones all qualify). The Weinsteins used to be able to open movies like this, but they seem to have lost their mojo.

The Way Back actually did a little better at the box office, despite being a bit of a tougher sell: Jim Sturgess is the lead, Ed Harris and Colin Farrell aren't guys that open movies themselves, the word doesn't really seem to be out about what a great young actress Saoirse Ronan is(*), and "people walk across various harsh environments, several dying" doesn't necessarily appeal to the folks looking for a fun night out. It was #15 in its semi-wide opening, and probably won't expand much farther, since the only Oscar nomination it got yesterday was a well-deserved bit of recognition for its make-up, and technical awards don't put butts in seats. It's a shame, because it's a very good movie, and watcihng it on Blu-ray won't do it justice.

(*) Hopefully Hanna will do the trick. The trailer for that played in front of The Way Back, and while I fear that the public won't be all-in for an action movie starring Ronan and Cate Blanchett, it looks like a lot of fun, and a chance for Ronan to announce that she's here and awesome to all those who missed Atonement. And The Lovely Bones. And even City of Ember. But mostly Atonement.


Anyway, the message is to see these movies while you can. The Weinstein Company and Newmarket aren't the forces that they once were, they're not getting awards bumps, and other movies are going to push them off screens fairly quickly.

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The Company Men

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 January 2010 at AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run)

The Company Men is a perilous balance of schadenfreude and nostalgia for a saner world. It might be better if writer/director/producer John Wells was a little more overtly rabble-rousing, but maybe he's too conscious of his own success in the entertainment business to do so without feeling a hypocrite.

In 2008, Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck) is on top of the world, an executive at Boston-based GTX (which stands for "Global Transportation Enterprises", sort of, but has long since diversified from its shipbuilding roots), but that is all about to fall apart as a merger of two divisions makes his job redundant. His severance is reasonably generous, but as he works on finding a new job at an "outplacement" center - sharing a cubicle with engineer Danny (Eamonn Walker), who has been at it for a few months - his colleague Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper) frets that he may be the next on the block (he makes senior salesperson money and his numbers have been slipping). Meanwhile, the company's vice-president, Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones) frets over the good people being let go, especially since CEO James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson) seems far more concerned with the value of his stock and fighting a buyout than the actual operation of the company.

There is, without a doubt, a certain amount of pleasure at watching Bobby get taken down a peg or three. The smug, entitled yuppie getting his comeuppance is one of the things that Ben Affleck does extremely well, in part because he knows how to measure those qualities for what the role demands - Bobby starts out more crass than cruel, and his reluctance to see what sort of bad shape he's in is generally on the more palatable side of the border between pride and arrogance. Wells uses the characters of Bobby's family to good effect - Rosemarie DeWitt's pragmatic wife both softens him and highlights his impracticality, while Kevin Costner's blue-collar brother-in-law and his constant stream of why we hate big business is both saying what much of the audience is thinking and overly combative. It's a nice job by Wells, Affleck, and that part of the supporting cast, really - a tricky but believable transition from enjoying Bobby's failure to rooting for his success.

Full review at EFC.

The Way Back

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 January 2010 at AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run)

In a more just cinematic world, The Way Back would be playing on IMAX screens and The Green Hornet would not. This is not a comment on the quality of Michel Gondry's film versus that of Peter Weir's, simply an observation that The Way Back aims to transport the audience to a different environment above all else, and that's what a screen that extends to the limits of one's peripheral vision does best. So, it goes without saying, this merits a look in theaters before it is reduced to home video.

Janusz (Jim Sturgess) is Polish, a difficult thing to be in 1939, as Hitler is approaching from one side and Stalin from the other. Winding up on the Russian side of the line, he is accused of being a spy and shipped off to a Siberian gulag. There, he immediately begins to plan his escape alongside several other political prisoners - among them Tomasz (Alexandru Potocean) and Zoran (Dragos Bucur), a pair of fellow Poles; Khabarov (Mark Strong), an actor imprisoned for a role he once played; and Mr. Smith (Ed Harris), an American engineer. A late addition to their party is Valka (Colin Farrell), a murderer fleeing the debts he racked up in camp. And then there's Irena (Saoirse Ronan), a young Polish girl they meet along the way south to Mongolia who claims to have escaped from a collective farm. Any pursuers or potential traitors in their party pale in danger to the elements, though - Janusz is the only one with particularly well-honed wilderness skills, and prisons are located in Siberia because the environment is a better deterrent to escape than the guards.

The Way Back has a plot, and some nice performances, but this is a movie about scale - Weir and company aim to demonstrate how impressive the accomplishment of the survivors is with wide shots of inhospitable environments, whether they be tundra, desert, or mountain. Against these backdrops of terrible natural beauty, the escapees are often tiny, underscoring the immensity of their challenge. Weir and cinematographer Russell Boyd compose these shots beautifully, and while the film isn't entirely about showing off shots of harsh environments, or even contrasting them with the tight, oppressive scenes of the gulag, they are the centerpiece, and are suitably impressive.

Full review at EFC.

Gantz

I went into Gantz kind of hoping for a mid-winter Fantasia preview - perhaps literally; I wouldn't be surprised at all to see subtitled versions of the Gantz movies playing that festival, especially since it doesn't look like the NCN/Fathom Events presentation extended to Canada, thus potentially making them Canadian Premieres. Instead, though, I got a preview of the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival.

Not so much in terms of the content - I've suggested it, but even with the week-long festival now preceding the marathon, I sort of suspect American crap will trump interesting foreign films most of the time (trivia about a cat who appeared in old b-movies gets more interest than any attempt I make to bring up contemporary indie/foreign sf on its message board) - but in terms of the audience. As much as I liked that there was at least one guy who dressed up in a homemade Gantz suit for the event, there was a lot of people yelling at the screen, which I'd kind of hoped might not be the case. For the 'thon, it's sort of expected, but any other time - good lord, folks, I paid $12.50 for this ticket, and it wasn't to listen to your jokes. Granted, you paid $12.50 as well, and maybe you think that paying such a relatively high price makes you entitled to something more, but remember - it's not like you paid more than anyone else, and the rest of us just expected to watch a movie.

Of course, it's kind of hard to be completely upset about it - the terrible dubbing job was practically begging for mockery. As I say in the review, I'm not sure quite why you release a film like this dubbed - while I suppose there are going to be some "civilians" who see the preview and figure that looks like a good bit of sci-fi action, the bulk of the audience is going to be pre-existing fans of the manga or anime, or general J-pop fans, and they are going to want it subtitled. Well, maybe not some of the anime fans (I gather there are people who prefer their anime dubbed, but I've never actually met them), but in spots like Boston, the theater would not have had to worry about lost sales with Japanese dialog. Heck, it could have been a fun experiment - dubbed at Boston Common, subbed at Fenway, or vice versa - see which sells out first!

Anyway, here's hoping that a chance to see the subtitled version pops up, or if Gantz: The Final Secret will play subbed when it comes out in April. I'm not holding my breath - this isn't the first time Viz has released movies via Fathom, and they're still running dubbed - but when the Q&A at the end has the stars saying they hope the next one features their voices, the buzz on Twitter has few if any thanking for the dubbed presentation compared to those who wanted the original Japanese... Well, maybe it's a tipping point.

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Like the 20th Century Boys flicks, it was fun to watch Gantz just from the perspective of how it compares to a manga that I've been reading for the past couple of years. As I mention in the review, I think they've toned it down quite a bit; the original book is a pretty hard-R sort of thing, and while much of the violence is still there, they've stripped out some of the silliness, a lot of the nudity, and made most of the characters a few years older so it's not so much about teenagers killing as it was. The first film mostly stops short of where the current American releases of the manga are (volume 15 is the latest to hit these shores), but one bit seems to either come from later volumes or be made up for the movie - I don't think we've seen the "100 point menu" yet, and what the movie shows happening when time runs out doesn't seem familiar (it would certainly effect the story that's going on right now).

There are budget and time issues as well - the statue sequence was pretty drastically pared down (but done well), and the teaser at the end suggests there won't be dinosaurs or crazy bikes in the next movie. That's fine, as I kind of suspect that going all-in with the CGI would have destroyed the budget and maybe worked against the somewhat grounded feeling that the film somehow manages to retain, despite its fantastical, often nutty elements. I would be kind of curious to see an American studio option the series and give adapting it a shot, though; depending how many volumes there are to the manga, it could be a good-sized franchise, and seeing a little money thrown at it might be interesting.

Also, I noticed that they cast a more conventionally attractive actress as Tae than what we saw in the comics. I'm not complaining, but it's a different vibe - in the comics, you can really see that an outsider would wonder what Kei was doing with her, whereas here, yeah, she's sort of an otaku, but she's the pretty, has-it-all geek girl (and, wow, Yuriko Yoshitaka was Fufumi in Adrift in Tokyo? I had no idea!).

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Gantz

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 January 2010 at Regal Fenway #8 (Fathom Events digital presentation)

It's a funny thing that the first live-action Gantz film feels kind of old-school; considering that the director's last project was a CGI feature, the original manga does not hide that it is produced with digital tools, and the story structure is something straight out of a video game, it wouldn't be surprising for Gantz-the-film to look and feel like something a computer spewed out. Instead, it feels like a refugee from the eighties, even if it is dressed up in post-Matrix black leather.

College student Kei Kurono (Kazunari Ninomiya) is waiting for the subway when he sees an old friend, Masuru Kato (Kenichi Matsuyama) who he hasn't spoken to in years. When an old man falls onto the tracks, Kato jumps down to rescue him, but himself needs rescuing when the train approaches. The next thing they know, they're in a nondescript apartment with several others - including high school kid Nishi (Kanata Hongo), hottie Kishimoto (Natsuna Watanabe), and salaryman Yoshikazu Suzuki (Tomorowo Taguchi) - and Gantz, a black sphere that tells them that their lives are no longer their own. They are to take the guns and bodysuits it proffers and finish off the "onion alien" - that's the way the cookie crumbles, and just the first mission for any survivors.

It was almost inevitable that Gantz was going to be toned down somewhat during the transition from page to screen - the action scenes in the manga are immense and varied, and would have stretched an American blockbuster's budget, let alone a Japanese one. The original serial occasionally reads like creator Hiroya Oku decided to draw monsters one month, got tired of it, switched to dinosaurs, then vampires, then whatever else caught his fancy, including plenty of gratuitous nudity. At times, it straddles the line between satire of adolescent fantasy and engaging in it. The movie shaves a fair amount of the edge off - the main characters are no longer teenagers and the more potentially sexist elements have been toned down - but not all. Dialing back the more exploitative elements does allow writer Yusuke Watanabe and director Shinsuke Sato to focus more on the idea of how the average person can be pushed to violence with surprising ease.

Full review at EFC.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 21 January 2011 - 27 January 2011

It looks like things are starting to get back to normal after the winter's nap - multiple films being released in multiplexes, the boutique houses back on calendar schedules, and the academically-affiliated venues back showing films.

Now, getting to and from them could be interesting, what with the snow and all - this certainly feels more like a traditional New England winter than any I can remember in years.

• Talk of winter leads logically to talk of Siberia (right?), Peter Weir's The Way Back may not be the biggest opening this weekend - in Boston, it's only showing up at Boston Common and Fresh Pond - but it's probably the safest bet. Weir tends to make interesting movies, the scenery and cinematography in the preview is gorgeous (somewhat to be expected, perhaps, with the National Geographic Society involved), and the cast is awfully solid: Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, Colin Farrell, and Saoirse Ronan may not jump off a poster, but they're all folks I would like to see walking four thousand miles from a Russian gulag to freedom in India.
  
  Maybe not quite so prestigious but also likely worth a look is The Company Men, which features a similarly noteworthy cast. Writer/director John Wells is mostly known for well-respected television (E.R., The West Wing), and the preview kind of looks like it's trying a bit too hard, but the cast is excellent: Aside from local guys Ben Affleck and Chris Cooper, it seems like it's been forever since Tommy Lee Jones showed up on movie screens. And, hey, Kevin Costner, who I think could be pretty good in this sort of blue-collar supporting role now that his leading man days are apparently done.
  
  The other big opener is No Strings Attached, with Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman. I've got to say, the preview makes it look like something I've seen before. In fact, at various points in its development, it went by the names "Friends with Benefits" and "F--- Buddies". There was a Friends (With Benefits) at the Boston Underground Film Festival last year that I liked quite a bit, which also went by "F--- Buddies" while being made, that seems to have the exact same plot, and there's another "Friends With Benefits" (sans parentheses) coming this summer with Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis. I suspect the best of the three will not contain any members of the That 70s Show cast (or, if you want to be less snarky, the Black Swan cast), but I've got to admit, I will probably see this one on the basis of "Kevin Kline is in it" alone.



• Over at Kendall Square, they actually got back into the announced one-week bookings last week with Partir; this week the one-week warning is also on a French movie, Nénette, a documentary by acclaimed director Nicolas Philbert about an orangutan who has just turned 40 and has lived in Paris's Jardin des Plantes for most of her life. It looks charming, and while not long (about 70 minutes), it's presented with a short film, "Night Falls on the Menagerie".
  
  The higher profile opening is Another Year, the new film by Mike Leigh which chronicles a year in the life of a married couple in his typically low-key way. It features Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen, and Lesley Manville.



• The week's Indian opening is Dhobi Ghat, which actually looks fairly conventional for a Bollywood product: A story of intersecting relationships in Mumbai, it's not a musical and runs a relatively comfortable 95 minutes. It played the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, so if you've been curious about Indian cinema but nervous about its odd reputation, this might be a good place to start.



• The Brattle Theatre begins a two-week "(Some of) The Best of 2010" series tonight with Inception. It continues through Wednesday with a Chloe Moretz double feature on Saturday (Let Me In & Kick-Ass), a pair of great leading ladies on Sunday (Isabelle Huppert in White Material and Tilda Swinton in I Am Love), Bong Joon-Ho's fantastic Mother on Monday, Cesar winner A Prophet on Tuesday, and Exit Through the Gift Shop on Wednesday. Several of the screenings will have introductions by members of the Boston Society of Film Critics. Check the calendar, because there have been some schedule changes to accommodate a couple special events.
  
  Those events include a nifty-looking screening of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre on Monday at 9:30pm; it's presented with the Boston Underground Film Festival and includes a special guest, actress Sabrina Dennison. Wednesday at 5:30pm, Race to Nowhere makes another appearance in the area, and someday this documentary about the unhealthily competitive environment in our schools will play at a time when I can get to see it. If you can make it to this screening, there will be a discussion with parenting/education expert Alfie Kohn afterward. And, on Thursday night, the Found Footage Film Festival comes to town with a program of oddities from the VHS age.



• The Coolidge Corner Theatre basically carries its programming from last week over, but has a couple of special presentations. The midnight show tonight and tomorrow is Primal a new bit of old-style Ozploitation featuring folks trying to survive a friend going nuts in the Outback. It's a quick preview booking before a Tuesday video release (they're actually screening the Blu-ray), but it sounds like fun. Monday night's Science On Screen program is Full Metal Jacket, which will have an introduction and Q&A by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, a "nationally known expert on combat trauma". And, on Thursday night, filmmaker Jesse Peretz flies out from Park City, UT, for the "Sundance USA" screening of My Idiot Brother, which has a heck of a cast (Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, and Emily Mortimer). It's sold out on-line, and probably at the box office, so consider this a reminder for those who already have their tickets.



• The Harvard Film Archive opens back up after a winter break with a massive presentation, the 25th Anniversary re-release of Shoah. Saturday and Sunday, both parts will screen - Part One at noon, and Part Two at 6pm. Part One also screens tonight at 6pm, and Part Two also runs Monday at 6pm. It is a titanic work - nine and a half hours, all told - but also a clearly important one.



• Emerson's film program also returns with a pair of Hungarian films. Tonight, director János Szász is present to screen and discus his second feature, Woyzeck, his 1994 adaptation of early nineteenth-century playwright Georg Büchner's most famous work (though his version is set in contemporary times). Tomorrow, they show 1972's Red Psalm by Miklós Jancsó. The family-friendly matinees are also back, with The Wizard of Oz showing Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening on genuine 35mm film.



• At the Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Festival of Films from Iran continues. Note that Salve has been dropped from the schedule, with tonight's screening replaced by Please Do Not Disturb. That festival will be running through the 29th, but The Agony and Ecstacy of Phil Spector will be starting on the 26th for a five-day run (with one screening a day, at various times). The director will be present for that first screening, but on the others, it's "just" an hour and a half long interview with the legendary (and now infamous) record producer conducted during his first trial.



• I've failed to mention it several times, but the ICA has been presenting "The Art and Technique of the American Commercial" on and off for the past month as part of their film program; the screening on Thursday loks like it may be the last chance to catch it.



• The second-run shuffle has All Good Things popping back up at the Somerville Theatre, sharing a screen with The Social Network, despite not being very good. At FEI's other theater, the Arlington Capitol, Casino Jack grabs a screen, as does Tron: Legacy (in 3-D). The Studio Cinema in Belmont opens Black Swan, while the Stuart Street Playhouse bumps Love and Other Drugs in favor of more shows of the out-on-video The Social Network (which is also playing on full screens in Arlington and Waltham). Apparently, there are a lot of folks as lazy about seeing that movie as I have been.

My plan? Well, I've already got my ticket for My Idiot Brother, and the priority for the new releases is The Way Back, The Company Men, then No Strings Attached. In between, maybe I'll do the Brattle Saturday night (I never did get around to seeing Kick-Ass) and find a spot for Nénette in between.

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

Busy week at work + snow + all-day Chlotrudis society meeting =



After a whole day spent discussing independent film, seeing a couple of mainstream movies seemed like a good idea. And both turned out to be firmly in the "good enough" category - not great examples of their genres, but pretty ably handled. The particular genres are common enough that a good job isn't enough to make a person really fall for a movie, but when folks ask you about it, you can say "yeah, that was pretty good."

They at least aren't upstaged by the previews, although the ones before Green Hornet gave it their best shot. For example, I'm actually finding myself pretty excited about Thor, even though it's never been a comic I ever followed (and quite honestly, I tend to scratch my head when the guy shows up in other Marvel books). It looks like a really fun movie, though, and I'm kind of excited by the look of the thing - the safe thing to do would likely have been to give it a realistic, Viking-influenced style, but Kenneth Branagh has opted to Kirby it up much more than I expected. That, I think, is going to make it a lot of fun.

And the Transformers 3 teaser... I think I've seen it three times now, and every time, every time, it fools me into thinking it's going to be for something a lot cooler than Transformers 3. Fortunately, it's scheduled to come out while I'm usually in Montreal, so I suspect I'll be able to resist the temptation to spend $20 and/or a lot of time getting to it.

The Green Hornet

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 January 2011 at AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, digital Imax)

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: I respect the heck out of how Sony, Seth Rogen, and company have handled The Green Hornet. Rogen dropped enough weight that it wouldn't just be gags about a fat superhero - indeed it was going to be a straight-out action movie at one point. Then Stephen Chow got attached, wanted more comedy, and writers Rogen & Evan Goldberg had the good sense to say "Stephen Chow wants funny, we add more funny!". Chow drops out, and instead of getting some pliable non-entity - a Brett Ratner or Martin Campbell - they hire Michel Gondry, and apparently rejigger it to be a Gondry film. This could have been homogenized and forgettable, but for all its faults, it's not that.

The main fault, I think, is that the "clueless" dial is turned one notch too high on Rogen's Britt Reid. On the one hand, I admire how uncompromising they are in that - Britt is a danger to himself and others when he tries to be a superhero, and Rogen, Goldberg, and Gondry aren't going to back down from that with a prefab plot about him just needing to gain confidence in himself. On the other hand... Well, I didn't much dig it the last time Rogen went this way, in Observe & Report. The unpleasant lead can be a really hard sell, even when it is the honest route.

Still, there's plenty else to recommend the film: Jay Chou is a really great Kato, and actually does the buddy-comedy stuff as well as the action. Christoph Waltz is a hilarious but still threatening villain. And while there are only a few moments that are absolutely and obviously Gondry's, his distinctive visual style does show up, and the finale is a rather nifty alchemy of silly, cartoonish slapstick and clear, well-directed action: It displays a sense of the absurd that more conventional directors wouldn't have in them.

The $12 ticket was likely an overpay - though I suspect the 3-D conversion is pretty good as far as such things go, it's clearly not built into the film's DNA the way it is for others, aside from a very nifty end credits sequence. It's a worthwhile matinee, though, maybe more if the idea of

The Fighter

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 January 2011 at AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run)

The Fighter is a more conventional movie, and perhaps works better for that. It's a boxing movie, but a good one; I generally don't have much patience for the genre, but this one's got a nice cast, a straightforward storyline that doesn't so much avoid hysterics as it keeps them on a leash. You can see director David O. Russell and his cast walking the fine line between playing to the rafters and chewing the scenery. It's the sort of sports movie where the hero's athletic technique perfectly matches what's going on in his real life (take all the punishment life gives you, strike back when you're counted out), but that's okay, because there's no speech about it.

It's got some pretty nice performances, too. Mark Wahlberg does well as the film's stable center, giving us full and heartfelt emotion without yelling too much, Amy Adams does trashy & sarcastic better than one might expect, and Christian Bale leverages his eating disorder to even better effect than usual. Add very nice supporting performances by Melissa Leo and Jack McGee as the parents of Wahlberg's Micky Ward, and you've got a nice portrait of a loving, but far from perfect, family.

The Fighter isn't a great movie, but in a year as relatively unimpressive as 2010, it looks pretty good. It gets the job done, which is nothing to be ashamed of.